


If Smallville Didn't Have DC-Mandate

by josephina_x



Category: Smallville
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-17
Updated: 2016-07-16
Packaged: 2018-02-21 13:41:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 51,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2470295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephina_x/pseuds/josephina_x
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spoilers: general for the entire series<br/>Word count: --- (varies by chapter)<br/>Summary: See individual chapter notes.<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Clark Kent growing up in Smallville (Jonathan Kent)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [If Thor Didn't Have Plot Shield](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2316206) by [Kadorienne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kadorienne/pseuds/Kadorienne). 



> Author's Note: This is kind of a riff off of Kadorienne's idea for her Loki-centric ["If Thor Didn't Have Plot Shield"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2316206) (gotta love the pun-that-wasn't there :), which, I have to say, is a bit ouchie and wince-worthy at times... in how glaringly-obviously it points out many of the various plotholes in ~~Loki 3 *cough, ahem* I mean,~~ Thor: The Dark World, that you could drive a semi-truck through, that is. (Speaking of which, if you like Marvel Movie-verse fic that is Loki-positive and at times Thor-bashing, you should [go read her stuff](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Kadorienne/pseuds/Kadorienne) if you aren't acquainted with it already.)
> 
> This is not that. Quite. That is, _this_ one has a lot less vitriol, and focuses more on longstanding DC canon-centric "plot mandates" for Superman-related properties than on "plot shield" for particular characters. (Well, except maybe Lana a bit, for what I believe are Obvious Reasons.) Each chapter is a different and completely separate story-thing that departs from canon at a particular point. I'll try to make those points of departure obvious, if I don't explicitly state them in the chapter summaries outright.
> 
> Okay, then. --On with the show! :)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This DC-mandate is the one that states that Clark Kent must grow up in Smallville. This somewhat works in comic book canon due to the town being somewhat smalltown-normal... _in **comic book** canon_.
> 
> Kind of a spinoff of an idea that's communicated explicitly (but remains unaddressed) in another SV fic of mine (Masks). In short: "Do your parents know? ... Then why haven't you moved away? If they know about your allergies to meteor rock, they should sell the farm and move. It's not safe for you here."
> 
> Character voice: Jonathan Kent

~*~*~*~*~*~

Well, that just tore it.

First, Clark had broken the chipper-shredder with his arm.

...Actually, no, _first_ Clark had gotten run over by that Luthor boy on the bridge on his way home from school.

Then Clark had broken the chipper-shredder with his arm.

 _Then_ there had been that whole mess with that coma-boy who'd gone around murdering ex-football players.

 _ **Then**_ Clark had gotten involved with that, and nearly gotten himself electrocuted by the coma-boy, who was apparently not just your average human anymore.

Not to mention how that Luthor brat was sniffing around Clark and the farm, now. Couldn't leave well enough alone, and it was obvious that the boy must've half-remembered something... more than humanly possible happening... from the crash, no matter how banged up and waterlogged he'd been going over the side and smashing into the riverbed like that.

And if Luthor-the-younger was sniffing about, Luthor-the-elder was sure to follow.

And then there were the meteor rocks.

That -- that last one -- was really the straw that broke the camel's back. Jonathan could put up with Luthor -- _the_ Luthors, either one -- if he had to. Batten down the hatches, and make sure Clark didn't forget what he'd told him, warned him about. The Luthors couldn't be trusted. Martha and Clark could, and they'd kept Clark safe for years. _That_ didn't worry him so much.

What did worry him was Clark's risking his life for his friends in town.

Not that there was anything wrong with that attitude, exactly, but Clark was only fifteen! And he was _literally_ risking his life!

And while Jonathan hadn't realized Clark was invulnerable to the point of shrugging off _speeding cars_ \-- just, maybe a bit more durable than most, given how he could toss his weight around on the farm -- it gave him no small relief to find out that Clark could.

When those blasted meteor rocks weren't around and making him sick, anyway. That had been an awful surprise.

The fact that Clark hadn't thought twice about stuffing his entire arm into a machine full of spinning blades didn't bode well for his son remembering that last little fact, though, and that worried the hell out of Jonathan. Clark wasn't invulnerable, but if he thought and acted like he was, in a place where he almost certainly wasn't, where meteor rock was littering the entire town, _everywhere_...

Jonathan trusted his adoptive alien son a lot, but he also knew what he'd taught him, and what Clark had learned. Clark's morals were too strong to let him stand by when someone was hurt or needed help, and Jonathan took quiet pride in that fact; he'd raised him right. But Clark was still only a fifteen year old boy and, up until he'd finally had to bite the bullet and show Clark his spacecraft a few days ago, Clark had had no idea _why_ it was so important to keep his abilities under wraps and work so hard to fit in. Clark's restraint was not nearly so strong as his morals, and lord knew that his son shouldn't _have_ to worry about trying to figure out how to help people without being found out at his age.

And what Clark didn't seem to get was that being found out was tantamount to risking his life for someone else. Or maybe he did and just didn't care. Jonathan wasn't sure which was going to give him worse nightmares.

Well, maybe it was selfish of him, but Jonathan valued the life of his son more than anyone else's; that was a parent's prerogative. And if Clark was going to continue to put his own life at risk every time he saw somebody he cared about in dire need of help... well, Jonathan couldn't exactly tell Clark 'no' outright -- not without being a hypocrite and turning those morals he preached about into so many worthless platitudes.

It might've been one thing if Clark was risking his life and was incredibly vulnerable. Jonathan _might_ have been able to get Clark to stop and think, and come up with a happy medium that could work and also keep Clark safe. And Clark _was_ vunerable.

But Clark didn't _think_ of himself as vulnerable, and it took only one rock held a few feet away from him -- or closer -- to completely incapacitate his son.

And when Clark wasn't near any meteor rocks, he was as safe as anything or anyone could be.

No, Jonathan couldn't exactly stop his son from helping others, and deep down he didn't really want to, despite the fear that was talking that wanted to prevent it. Clark was fifteen, and vulnerable in a lot more ways than just physically under the right circumstances, in proximity to the wrong substances.

Jonathan couldn't stop him, if Clark saw something that needed doing. _If_ he saw it.

So if he couldn't keep Clark away from the trouble, then maybe he'd just have to keep the trouble away from Clark. Along with those blasted meteor rocks.

And Jonathan knew one way to, inappropriately put it, kill two birds with one stone.

In fact, it might be the only way to do it, with these 'meteor freaks' of Chloe's popping out of the woodwork, now. First the coma-boy, and then this bug-boy -- who'd come after Clark in their own barn, no less! -- and having these youngsters with no small abilities of their own running about town without a care to who saw them doing what wasn't about to be giving Clark any small reason to try and keep under the radar, either. They were a bad influence, at best, and they were murderous boys at worst.

The town just wasn't safe anymore. It hadn't been for some time, least of all for Clark with the meteor rock around, but Jonathan hadn't known that, and neither had Martha. And now, with all these kids running around and indiscriminately injuring, blowing up, or killing the regular folks in town... No. Just, no.

Jonathan had stuck out a lot of ugliness in town, and this was his family's land. But there was stubbornness, and there was just plain stupidity, and he wasn't about to ruin Clark's life over a plot of land they could barely maintain on their own without people asking too many pointed questions on exactly how they did it. It was time to move on.

He and Martha had discussed contingency plans before, in the event that somebody learned about Clark and they had to disappear. This wasn't the same thing, exactly, but that just meant that they could get away with leaving less behind. Things would be easier. They could sell the farm, pay off their debts, and have a tidy nest egg left over to help them start again somewhere else, not just have to rely on the emergency fund they'd been putting into from day one.

It would be a bit of an upheaval for Clark, but in some ways it would be good for him, maybe better than things were here. Clark was just starting ninth grade, and it wasn't too late in the year for a transfer to do his grades much harm. And, wherever they went, Clark would have a chance to start over, and maybe get some more new friends. He'd known Pete forever, and they'd been thick-as-thieves, but Pete Ross had been Clark's only real friend up until last year, when that Chloe Sullivan had moved to town. Two friends was not all that many, and Clark had complained for awhile now about wanting to try out for sports, or anything that would let him socialize a bit more, and let him shine.

Jonathan didn't think sports were a good idea, but more academic pursuits -- like chess club, for example -- would be just fine. Clark couldn't really stand out in town, it being too risky for too many reasons here, but there was more than one way to fit in, or to shine without standing out from the crowd. Pete might've teased his son for geeking out too much if Clark had dared to think aloud to him about trying it, and Clark knew it, which was why Jonathan hadn't suggested the idea any more strongly to Clark than he already had before. But Pete wouldn't be around to make Clark feel uncomfortable about it, if they moved away. Finding a less football-mad town would be a good start for that, even though it made Jonathan do far worse than wince to have to think about the Smallville Crows the way Martha did as an outsider.

Jonathan thought about Granville, but that still might be a bit close. They could do worse than to move out to the boondocks, _really_ further out, well away from the city and any Luthors who might be lurking about therein. If they found a farm that far out, nobody'd be around to see Clark doing what-have-you, and they'd be safer than ever. Or, maybe they could move to a house in the middle of some other town and Martha could use her pre-law degree for something practical and a more hefty paycheck than they'd make from the fall harvest any year, though Jonathan had no idea what he'd do with himself if they decided on that. A house in a town elsewhere and a steady paycheck coming in would automatically make Clark more 'normal' in the eyes of his new classmates, over being a farmer's son in this day and age; Jonathan knew that. There was something to be said for having a large and out of the way plot of land for Clark to 'play' in, though.

...Well, one thing was for sure. Whatever he and Martha decided on, they weren't staying here; they were pulling up stakes. Smallville was too dangerous for their boy anymore, be it homicidal teenagers, suspicious and curious Luthors, or poisonous meteor rocks. It was well-past time to move on.

And the best part was, outside of Smallville, there were no meteor rocks, and no way for anyone to know what they'd do to his boy -- christ, even he and Martha hadn't known! So if someone _did_ try and hurt Clark outside of Smallville, after finding out about their little family secret, or for _whatever_ other reason, they were going to be in for one _hell_ of a surprise.

Jonathan smiled, because he could live with that.

~*~*~*~*~*~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: ...and then there was no 'Smallville' past the pilot ep(s). ...And Lex and Lana and Pete and Chloe and everybody left in town probably (almost definitely) died at various points due to all the meteor freak catastrophes that were never stopped, and Clark eventually ended up going up against Lionel as Superman because it was Lionel who was his Luthorian enemy and obviously Segeth all along, the end.


	2. Lex Luthor is Superman's enemy and must not know his secret identity (Lex Luthor)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This DC-mandate is the one that states that (Clark Kent/)Superman and Lex Luthor must be enemies, and Lex must never know Clark's secret (well, not for long anyway).
> 
> Character voice: Lex Luthor

~*~*~*~*~*~

"I could've sworn I hit you," Lex said, feeling a bit dazed.

"If you'd hit me, I'd be dead," said the boy, his dripping wet savior, who looked about as shocked to be alive as he was.

...Well, that was a lousy assumption, anyway.

"Oh," said Lex. "Well, I guess we're both dead, then."

The boy looked back at him, then blinked.

Then he proceeded to pat himself down, tentatively, like he was trying to tell whether he was really alive or not, but wasn't sure if he might break something if he wasn't too careful about it.

Lex tilted his head to the side and stared at him, as he sat there on the riverbank.

He calmly noted, with a bit of an odd detachment, that the boy hadn't actually denied that Lex had hit him.

_Huh,_ he thought.

And then he didn't have too much to think about, as the wrath of smalltown fatherhood descended upon him and demanded that he leave his son alone. And drive slow.

...Well, he could certainly do one of those two things.

It also occurred to him, belatedly, as he was being led into an ambulance, that -- one -- the boy was being taken home, instead of being checked over like any anxious parent should have been righteously demanded be done, and -- two -- that he hadn't actually thanked the boy for saving his life yet.

Two days later, he rectified this by showing up at the boy's house, making sure that he and his parents were the only ones on the premises to be anything close to within earshot of what he was about to say, and promising that their secret was safe with him, and that he'd do anything in his power to help out if it ever looked as though that might no longer be the case at any point in the future.

A priceless gift of a life for a priceless gift of a life. Lex figured that would be about even.

~*~*~*~*~*~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: Because there's no way that early-season Lex (in Smallville canon even!) would have thought that giving Clark a truck would make things even, given his thoughts and feelings on friendship, love, and responsibility in general. It's way too blaise, and the canon-presented idea that Lex would have actually written Clark off and not paid further attention to him, except for the fact that he gave back the truck when his father told him to, as was not quite stated outright in those terms in the pilot episode, is ludicrous. He remembered hitting Clark with his car, and he was suspicious enough to get wireframe simulations done of the impact. He wasn't letting it go to begin with.
> 
> Lex is also demonstrably a lot more thoughtful and strategic than that. (Remember, this is the guy who noticed and picked up the meteor rock necklace out in the middle of that corn field, and suggested to Clark that giving Lana back her necklace in a very nice-looking box with an explanation as to how he came by it might be a really good way to get Whitney's ass kicked to the curb and give himself a very strong in with her.) Giving Clark a truck was not the best in, not by a long shot; even if he'd known that Jonathan would prompt more contact between them by making Clark reject the gift, that still wasn't the best way to start any real sort of lasting relationship or association between them, I'm sorry, Lex is just out-and-out smarter than that.
> 
> (Yes, I do realize that my rant here was about as long as the chapter-fic itself. Meh.)


	3. Lana Lang is Clark's high school sweetheart (Clark Kent)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This DC-mandate is the one that states that Lana Lang was Clark's high school sweetheart in Smallville, and diverges from canon at the end of episode 2 of season 1.
> 
> Character voice: Clark Kent

~*~*~*~*~*~

Clark was angry with Lex, because Lex had told Lana about how he'd been the Scarecrow.

The operative word there was "was". As in, Clark _had_ been angry with Lex, but now he was feeling an uncomfortable mixture of sickness and relief.

And no, meteor rock had nothing to do with it, really.

He'd told Lex to stay out of it, made him promise not to tell anyone, because he'd been afraid that people would laugh at him, or maybe feel sorry for him, if they knew.

Lana hadn't done either. What she had done was _worse_. She'd let Whitney off the hook. She'd forgiven him. She didn't care.

She didn't care what had happened to Clark. And it wasn't like she hadn't believed what had happened was true. She knew, and she didn't care.

She'd tumbled herself right off of her pedestal, and Clark had sat up and taken notice.

Even if Lana somehow magically decided to drop Whitney tomorrow, and instead feel the same way about Clark that she felt about Whitney, Clark wasn't sure if he _wanted_ to be with someone who would be okay with him doing something like that to somebody else. ...No, actually, that was a lie -- he was pretty sure he knew _exactly_ how he felt about it.

So no, Clark wasn't mad at Lex anymore. If anything, he owed Lex a 'thank you'.

He should probably get right on that.

He didn't know how Lex had known about Lana, and it was kind of a crappy and roundabout way of letting him know that he could really do better than to set his sights on her, but it probably would've been the only way to get through to him -- Clark knew he certainly hadn't ever listened to anybody else when it had come to Lana Lang before -- and that was what friends did for each other. They looked out for each other, even when their friends were being completely stupid about things.

Well, Clark was going feel stupid and completely embarrassed doing it, but he'd suck it up and let Lex know that the message had been received. He didn't need to help Clark try to win Lana Lang's heart anymore.

Although he might also have to have a conversation with Lex about how, maybe, the next time Lex promised to keep something a secret of his, that if he had reservations about that something, that he might try talking it out with Clark first. And Clark would promise to listen.

~*~*~*~*~*~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: Because even Clark is not that stupid. If he's smart enough and sensitive enough to back off and not to run after Chloe from the season 2 pilot onwards (given her profession to have found a different boyfriend who made her forget all about Smallville (and him) during her summer in Metropolis, along with her complete lack of communication with him and not actually even doing him the courtesy of breaking up with him first), he's smart enough to drop Lana like a brick after this.


	4. Lex Luthor never wins in the end, or in any way otherwise (Lex Luthor)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This DC-mandate is the one that states that Lex Luthor never really wins, and -- by corollary -- that Superman must always triumph over Lex Luthor ...eventually. I have to put the eventually in there because there was that one storyline in the comics (and the DCAU cartoon, and again implied at coming about after the 7-year jump in the Smallville series finale) where Lex Luthor was the president of the United States and then proceeded to tick Superman off at every opportunity. Lex eventually ends up kicked out of the Oval Office and eventually-eventually is always called out as a criminal and/or actually imprisoned in jail for significant periods of time, though, in every medium Superman has been in-print or otherwise translated-to.
> 
> ...Actually, this Lex-never-wins thing happens so often in Smallville that it's hard to pick just one. So let's tie this in with the mandate from chapter 2 and mix a little with some events of Belle Reeve during 'Asylum' and go from there, shall we?
> 
> (Yes, I realize that "evil never wins" -slash- "good shall triumph over evil" is a Comics Code Authority mandate from the 1954 that has superseded various comics plotlines for years, but it's _DC_ that decided that it is a universal constant that Lex ends up evil in pretty much every universe out there in the multiverse, no matter how he started out, no matter what -- case in point, Alexander Luthor in Infinite Crisis -- so in actuality 'Lex always losing' is still a _DC_ mandate. So there :-P )
> 
> (So yes, I realize that this one technically boils down to Lex always being destined to be evil by DC mandate. Boo, hiss. Also, _unfair_.)
> 
> Fair warning: this one's written a bit differently than the previous three.
> 
> Character voice: Lex Luthor

~*~*~*~*~*~

He doesn't stay down for long.

He's not sure how long he was down for the count, but he doesn't stay down for long.

He gets his hands under him and pushes against the floor, turns his head. "Clark?"

No Clark. No gurney, no meteor freaks, no meteor rock, and no...

Clark.

Meteor rock.

_Shit._

Lex shoves himself to his feet. "Clark!" he calls out, swivelling on his feet. "Clark! _Clark!!_ "

He hears a shout behind him -- not Clark -- and his head twists around to see several burly priso-- _mental asylum_ guards converging on his location.

Oh, _hell_ no.

"They-- they've got Clark! Clark was here!" he says, backing up down the one part of the T-intersection that doesn't have a guard coming down it. He sees them form up in the hallway and remembers that they're probably mad at him about last time, when he was trying to escape, how he hurt one of them. He isn't trying to escape now, though -- not without Clark -- he's just worried about Clark -- and so he holds his hands up, palms outwards. "My- my friend. They attacked him -- I need to help him!" He tries to control his breathing, realizes that sounding insane won't help. "You need to let me help him!"

They so don't believe him.

His back slams into something somewhat hard, and stumbles and cranes his head upwards to see--

_Shit!_

Lex struggles as the fourth guard he _hadn't seen_ \-- _where the hell had he come from?!_ \-- grabs onto him by the shoulder, hard.

It's self-defense.

Lex slams his elbow into the guard's solar plexus, shoves himself to the side and behind the man, and starts to run.

"Clark!!"

He needs to find Clark.

Where is he?!

"CLARK!!"

Why isn't he-- _the meteor rock._

Lex takes a corner and nearly runs straight into another guard, flails his arms about to keep balance, ducks under the man's arms -- still flailing, why is his balance so off? -- and keeps going, doesn't let himself slow down.

He nearly trips over his feet, sees red.

Blood on the floor, just a few droplets, only really registers after he's well past it.

Someone had been bleeding.

Someone who had been in a fight recently; the staff cleaned the floors too well.

Clark.

And it hadn't dried yet.

Clark. Had to be.

Ian needed him... for what? Why had they taken Clark?

The freaks had said they were trying to escape, hadn't they?

The Ians had said that Clark was his 'first-class ticket' out of there... but Clark wouldn't help him, any more than Lex would.

Ian had hurt Clark, beaten him; Ian had beaten Lex. The Ians had beaten them both.

How could Ian get out of there with Clark if Clark needed to be wheeled around on a gurney?

Ian needed him... for someone else? Who would be able to break them out but couldn't right now. Not without Clark.

...But why? What did they need Clark for? Clark didn't have any money.

Lex turns another hallway, still running, tries to ignore the shouting behind him. He doesn't shout anymore, because if he can hear them...

...then they can hear him, too. Not just Clark. If he shouts for Clark.

Where is Clark?

He turns another corner. He hears closer shouting.

He's in the central area now. No-one is around.

Back in the cells because of his 'breakout'? Because of the freaks' breakout?

Had anyone else even noticed they were missing, or just him?

Lex spins about in a circle. Voices, closer. Loud, angry ones. Guards.

He has to hide. Where can he hide?

Where is Clark?

The freaks are trying to escape. They took Clark with them. ...Outside?

He has to hide, and find a way out, and get to Clark. Clark is hurt.

He is in the central area. They have cameras here, in the corners, up high. He can't hide here.

He has to find a way out, and get to Clark. Clark is hurt. ...Outside?

Lex picks up a chair and slams it against the window.

The window bars don't give.

He slams the chair against the window again.

The window bars don't give.

He slams the chair against the window again.

The window bars don't give.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting something different to happen.

He slams the chair against the window again.

The window bars don't give.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting something different to happen.

He slams the chair against the window again, expecting something different to happen.

The window bars don't give.

He hears shouting behind him.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting something different to happen.

He screams.

He slams the chair against the window again, _not_ expecting something different to happen.

The window bars give.

Lex's breath catches.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting something different to happen.

He slams the chair against the window again, expecting the _same thing_ to happen.

The window breaks.

The guards are there. He fights off grasping hands with the chair, and people are yelling at him.

Hands reach for him, attached to guards. He throws the chair at them, too angry with them to yell back.

He turns and goes out the window.

He grabs at the side of the building -- the window frame -- thin air -- and drops.

He screams, for a completely different reason than before.

He hits the ground.

Bushes.

He hurts.

He climbs out of the bushes and hits dirt. Sprawls out, face-up.

He has found a way out, to get to Clark. He is outside.

He gets his hands under him and pushes against the ground, turns his head. "Clark?"

He has to get to Clark, because Clark is hurt. ...Outside?

He staggers upright.

He is outside. He can't see Clark.

...Clark isn't outside?

Where is Clark?

He needs to find Clark.

Where is he?!

"CLARK!!"

Why isn't he-- _the meteor rock._

...Hasn't he thought this before?

Lex staggers sideways.

He was drugged.

He is drugged.

_Shit._

He drops into a crouch and holds his head in his hands.

He isn't thinking clearly. He was drugged, again. The guards had restrained him. The guards had drugged him.

The guards had restrained and drugged him, and he isn't thinking clearly.

He has to think.

He has to think. He stays right where he is. He holds his head in his hands and rocks in place.

He has found a way out, to get to Clark. He is outside.

He has to find a way in, to get to Clark. Clark is inside.

He has to get to Clark, because Clark is hurt. ...Inside?

Why were the freaks still inside? They want to escape to the outside, don't they? They aren't stupid.

Ian is smart.

Ian had a plan. He had meteor rock. He had a gurney and had wanted and gotten Clark.

Ian had seen Lex clamped down under metal restraints after Lex had tried to escape. Outside. He'd gotten a pencil, and hurt a guard, and gotten an ID card from a guard, and gotten away, and gotten outside, and got himself caught at the fence. He'd tried to climb it and almost made it over. _Almost._ But _almost_ wasn't enough. They'd tased him before they'd grabbed him; it had hurt a lot. So had the barbed wire on his hands.

Ian is smart, and Ian had a plan, and Ian had offered to take Lex with them if Lex had promised them money, before Clark came. Lex had said no. Because Ian had tried to kill his friends for money, before.

Lex had said no. Because he knew Clark would come.

Ian didn't end up in Belle Reeve because he was stupid. Ian made plans. Ian hadn't gotten caught by accident; he'd gotten caught on-purpose, because someone had purposefully set a trap for him.

Ian had only gotten caught because Clark had caught him. It's hard to plan for Clark when you don't want to hurt him.

Ian is too smart to get caught again, and Ian doesn't care about whether his plans get Clark hurt or not.

Ian has a double, and his freak power is that nobody can tell if his double is out or not unless they are both standing right there next to each other.

Ian has a double, and that double could look, and look, and look, just as long as the two of them never stood right next to each other, and nobody would know.

Ian is smart. Ian wants to escape. But Ian is patient, and makes plans, and wouldn't get caught the way Lex had gotten caught when he'd tried to escape.

Why were the freaks still inside?

Because Ian is smart.

And there is more than one way to escape.

Lex blinks.

There is more than one way to escape.

Lex looks up. He looks at the broken window.

There is more than one way to get outside.

...There are no more people at the window.

He looks down. There is no-one outside yet.

No one sees him. No one is looking. Watching. Waiting.

Lex starts to move, through the bushes, behind the bushes, staying by the side of the building. No one can see him.

He hadn't been moving while they'd been looking. He isn't running, trying to escape. They won't think they'll need dogs to chase him like the last time he was outside, when he was trying to escape.

It's okay if they chase him, as long as there aren't any dogs. It's okay if they chase him, as long as they don't catch him, not before he finds Clark again. He'll need the backup. Just not dogs.

Dogs aren't backup, but humans are, and the guards are human.

The guards don't like people escaping Belle Reeve. The guards don't like the freaks fighting in Belle Reeve. They won't help Lex, but they will stop the Ians.

So Lex is okay with the guards chasing them, because it will be better if they are there when Lex finds Clark, because Clark is hurt and the Ians need to be hurting.

As long as there aren't any dogs. When dogs smell Lex, they growl and want to bite him.

He grabs a handful of leaves and dirt and rubs them against his skin as he moves. To help cover up his smell. Just in case.

He finds a side door.

He crouches in the bushes and waits.

Guards rush out the side door and group up.

He crouches in the bushes and waits.

The guards disperse.

He crouches in the bushes and waits.

Another guard bursts out of the door and jogs off.

He crouches in the bushes and waits.

...No-one is around anymore. No-one else comes through the door.

Lex stands up.

He walks over to the door and opens it. It isn't locked from the outside.

Belle Reeve wasn't made to keep people out. It was made for people to go in.

It's... quiet.

Lex is on the first floor. It is quiet. He is quiet.

He is careful.

He finds another door. He opens it.

The door opens onto to a stairwell. The stairs go up. The stairs only go up.

Stairs can take you up, but too high up means the only way out is too far down.

Sometimes, the only way out is death.

Clark had better not be dead.

Lex frowns at the thought, then smiles and steps inside the stairwell, and looks around. Lex smiles, and walks behind the corner of the stairs, underneath them. Lex smiles, because he knows. There is another door.

There is another door.

Lex smiles, because there is always another door.

Lex smiles, because he knows. This is Kansas. There is always a further down.

Stairs can take you down, but there is never a too far down. Not from down; not here. There is always another way up and out. There is always a way up from down, in Kansas.

The tornados make it so.

Lex opens the other door. There are more stairs, and the stairs go down.

Lex steps inside and goes further down.

Concrete walls and floors open out onto a large room. Metal walkways shoot up from the floor. Lots of heavy machinery crowds the interior and the walls.

Lex keeps walking.

Metal walkways disappear. The machinery is interspersed more and more with lots of pipework and thick cabling.

Lex hears voices.

They don't sound like guards.

Lex walks towards the voices.

The lights flicker.

Lex stops. He glances upwards.

Lex starts when he hears a very bad sound, like lightning, and things breaking.

There is a bang.

The lights go out.

He hears angry voices.

They don't sound like guards at all.

Lex looks around in the dim glow of emergency lighting and finds a long, thin pipe. It has a bend at the end of it, good for holding. Good for hitting.

He picks it up carefully. Turns it. Lets it slide down his fingers until he's holding it like a baseball bat.

Lex walks towards the voices, slowly. Quietly. Two of them sound like the Ians. One sounds like Eric.

Eric had used to be strong enough to toss somebody into a car and dent the car. Or lift a car.

Or push one aside like it weighed nothing. Like Clark.

Not anymore. Eric wouldn't be in Belle Reeve if he could still do that. He'd just leave.

But Clark is strong enough to get hit by a car and dent the car. Lex knows that twice-over. Lex knows that from the bridge. Lex knows that from Edge's safehouse.

Eric is here, with the Ians. Eric, who couldn't be hurt when Clark was hurt, and Clark is hurt now, Lex knows.

Eric had used to be as strong as Clark, back then.

And Clark had gotten hurt when Eric hadn't, back then. And then...

Eric had gotten caught because he wasn't strong anymore.

And Clark hadn't gotten hurt when Morgan Edge had tried to run him over. And then...

Eric is here, with the Ians...

And Clark had gotten hurt when the freaks had used meteor rock on him.

And all the freaks hate Clark for catching them and putting them in Belle Reeve.

So...

_No._

Clark is hurt, Lex knows, but Clark had better not be dead. Or Lex will kill him.

Lex will kill Eric first, for killing Clark, and then Lex will beat the Ians within an inch of their lives for hurting Clark, and then Lex will _kill_ Clark for being _so **stupid!**_

Lex rounds a piece of machinery, and jerks backwards behind it again, out of sight again -- he can't see, so he can't be seen -- when something that sounds like a body hits something else hard, and falls.

Lex knows what it sounds like for a body to hit something hard and fall.

...and he can still hear Eric. Eric isn't that close. He can't hear the Ians. Either of them.

Eric had used to be strong enough to toss somebody into a car and dent the car. Or lift a car.

Can Eric now do that again? Or was it Clark?

Lex hears Eric. And Lex hears Clark.

Clark is _taunting_ Eric.

Wait, Clark doesn't taunt anyone. Why would he even think about doing that? Why would he need to?

Why would he need to...

To taunt Eric to...

...

Lex runs.

He rounds the piece of machinery, and bares his teeth when there is still no-one in sight, and runs.

A turn, two, three, changing direction, and Lex runs harder despite the dimness of what little light there is that is barely illuminating the floor. He's getting closer to the noises and yelling.

And then he skids to a halt, barely jumps over a body before he trips over it where it lays, prone on the floor.

He turns and crouches down quickly and checks--

Not Clark. Ian.

_Good._

There is a bang.

Lex jumps to his feet, hears that bad sound again, and it _is_ lightning, he sees it arcing and breaking to his right. He spins in place.

The lights come on.

He sees someone looming over someone else and stifles a snarl as he rubs at the bright spots messing up his vision. Half-blind, he sprints towards them at full speed, raises his pipe with both hands, and--

His vision clears. Clark's the one who is standing.

\--he's going to hit Clark.

He pales and nearly drops the pipe as he backpedals hard and yelps, "Clark!" Clark hears and turns towards him, dropping Eric.

Lex is off-balance, out of control and still half-skidding half-tumbling forward. He's going to hit Clark.

He pinwheels his arms madly, and rams straight into Clark.

Clark catches him up and turns. Lex grabs at him and they spin. Together. Clark is cushioning him.

Clark sets him down.

"Lex?"

Clark sounds confused.

Lex is slightly out of breath and very very relieved. Clark is awake and not on the gurney. And Eric can't throw people at cars or walls or other things if he's unconscious and slumped to the floor like that.

"You're okay," Lex breathes out the fatigue-slurred words in a gasp. He's been running a lot today.

Clark is Clark. He holds Lex upright while Lex catches his breath again. It doesn't take long. It also doesn't take Clark long to stop staring down at Lex and instead ask, "What are you doing here?"

Lex looks up. "In Belle Reeve?" He frowns as he pushes off of Clark one-handed, pipe dangling from the other. He peers up at Clark searchingly. "How hard did Ian hit you?"

Clark looks sort of startled. "Uh, what?" He watches Clark blink, frown, shake his head. "No, I mean--" Clark catches Lex's hand, keeping Lex from feeling his head over for bumps and bruises. "--What are you doing down _here?_ " Clark corrects himself.

And Lex hesitates.

"...You want me to still be upstairs and getting my brain fried?" Lex says slowly, and he frowns and tugs his hand free, pulls away from Clark, suddenly unsure.

"What?! _No!_ " Clark tells him with an appropriate amount of horror, reaching out and recapturing Lex's hand, and Lex relaxes. "I'm glad you're not up there! I mean... why did you come down here? Why are you here right now? It's dangerous!"

Lex bites his lip slightly and feels... a little embarrassed. Because...

"I know it's dangerous," he admits. "That's why I came. I, uh... I'm here to rescue you?" he says, squeezing Clark's hand back lightly.

Clark looks at him blankly.

"Things didn't exactly go as planned," Lex admits. He hadn't meant to take so long.

"Uh, yeah." Clark winces, and then looks at Eric, then Ian. Clark looks up at him and colors. "Sorry about that."

Lex recovers his captured hand from Clark again and waves off the apology. "It's not your fault," Lex reminds him. "It's my father's fault. And the guards and doctors." He frowns. "And Ian's." He glances down at Eric. "And maybe his, too," he gestures at Eric with the length of pipe, glowering.

Really, there's a lot of blame to go around for why he isn't out of Belle Reeve yet.

"Okay, but..." Clark looks a little worried for some reason. He glances down at the length of pipe Lex is holding again. So does Lex.

Then Lex remembers something he'd almost forgotten.

Lex smacks Eric upside the head with the pipe.

"Lex!" Clark protests, jumping forward and grabbing the pipe away from him. Lex lets him take it away from him and squats down in front of Eric. "Wait, what are you--"

Lex pokes at the side of Eric's head -- where he hit the freak -- grabs his jaw and tilts. He notes the red rawness of the wound and the beginnings of a bruise at his temple.

"Good," he mutters under his breath, letting go of him. He pushes off of his knees, shoves himself to his feet again.

"Lex--" Clark pulls him away from Eric. "Why did you do that!"

"I wanted to make sure he could be hurt," Lex told him, backing away as Clark did.

He watches Clark clench his jaw, then unclench it. "Don't do that again," he's told.

"Only if I need to," Lex tells him agreeably. Clark's the one with the pipe now, anyway.

Clark gives him a frown.

Then it occurs to Lex that he might have assumed something that he shouldn't have.

Lex pokes a finger at Clark's head in one of the places where he saw Ian hit him, before, up in the hallway upstairs, and Clark jerks away from him, tensing up slightly. "What--" He grabs Lex's hand again. "Lex--"

Lex frowns, grabs him by the other arm with his free hand, and leans in. "You're not hurt, are you?" he asks him seriously.

Clark looks down at him.

"No," Clark tells him.

Lex narrows his eyes at Clark. Then he leans in even closer and peers into Clark's eyes searchingly, asks, "You're not _lying_ to me again, are you?"

"...No," Clark tells Lex. "I'm fine."

Lex narrows his eyes still further. "You weren't fine before."

"I am now," Clark tells him quietly. "I'm fine now."

Lex stares at him a little longer, piercingly. ...He's pretty sure Clark is telling him the truth. Probably.

"Okay," Lex says, and backs off, lets go of him. Then Lex glances around. "Where's the meteor rock?" he asks.

Clark doesn't tell him, or really say anything at all, so Lex starts looking for it himself.

"Lex--" Clark says behind him, as Lex roots around on the gurney for it and doesn't find it.

"Lex!" he hears Clark repeat, as Lex moves on with his searching, and Lex finds the meteor rock on the floor near Eric.

He picks it up, turns it over in his hands, looking at it -- yes, it's meteor rock, all right -- then turns away from Clark. Lex throws it as hard as he can, high up into the air, back the way he came.

He turns back to Clark. "Stay away from those rocks," he orders Clark quellingly.

Clark sort of freezes in place for a second or two. Then his mouth drops open. "I--"

" _No excuses!_ " Lex tells him, pointing a finger at him.

Clark snaps his jaw shut and stares at him.

"...Okay," Clark says finally.

Lex nods at him once.

"You are not allowed to get hurt," Lex tells him, as he turns away from Clark. "Anymore." He frowns. "Again," he adds darkly, not liking having to make all these appendations, while getting his bearings in the big open area like he hadn't been able to when he'd first rushed in.

"...Lex?" Clark asks him from behind him. Lex's gaze skips over Ian, still prone on the floor across the room from them, obviously no longer a threat.

"Yes?" Lex says, then stops turning as he recognizes... --Okay, he came in _that_ way, so the way out must be...

"Why did you come after me?" Clark asks closer now, by his shoulder.

"Why did I..." Lex turns and stares up at Clark blankly. "Why _wouldn't_ I do that?"

"I came to get you out," Clark points out, and Lex frowns at him.

"Yes?" Lex knew that. "I remember. You told me that earlier."

Clark's forehead wrinkles a bit, then smooths out again. "Yes, I did. But I wanted you to get out, with or without me."

"So?" Lex says. Clark crosses his arms and looks at him like he's waiting for something, and Lex rolls his eyes and turns away. "I can't escape without you," Lex explains.

"Oh," he hears Clark say.

"Leaving without you would be just rude, especially after you tried to rescue me first; I'm not doing that," Lex tells him.

"Oh," he hears Clark say.

Lex glances up at him over his shoulder. "It's only fair."

"Right," Clark says, with a weak sort of smile.

But Clark _is_ smiling at him.

Lex nods at him once.

Then he grabs Clark's arm by the wrist and starts walking.

"Wh-- Lex?"

"Yes?"

"Where are we going?"

"Out," Lex tells him as they turn the corner, passing more machinery.

"But isn't that that way?"

Lex stops walking and glances over his shoulder and sees where Clark is pointing. "No," he tells Clark, moving them along again. "That's where I came from, and where I threw the meteor rock. We're not going that way."

"But that's the way out." Clark sounds frustrated.

Lex displays patience, as he explains that, "No, Clark, that's the way in."

"It's also the way out."

"No, it's one way out," Lex tells him. "We're taking the other way out."

"What?"

"The other way out," Lex repeats. "It's safer."

Lex can practically hear Clark frowning at him, or maybe it's just in his tone. "Safer? How do you even know there's a way out this way?"

"Because it is."

"Lex." Clark tugs him to a halt. "Have you been down here before?" He frowns.

"No," Lex says. "If I had, I probably would have escaped, instead of getting caught."

Clark shifts from side to side, watching him. "Lex, we know if we go back that way that there's a way out."

Lex shakes his head until Clark stops talking, and then Lex says, "No, that's only a way out. We can't escape that way."

"Why not?" Clark says, sounding frustrated.

"Because I tried that and it didn't work."

Clark hesitates, then barrels forward. "--But I'm with you this time," and Clark cuts himself off but gives Lex an impatient look as Lex shakes his head at him again.

"They'll see you," Lex says.

"I don't care--"

" _WELL, I DO!_ " Lex yells at him, breathing hard, and he feels too tight in his skin as he watches Clark's eyes go wide. "I do," Lex says. "I do care. _I'm_ keeping your secret. No-one else knows. I'm not telling. I _promised_ ," Lex says, feeling a clawing desperation inside, as he reaches for Clark and grabs onto him.

He feels Clark shudder slightly, but then Clark slowly wraps his arms around Lex, pulling him in close, and it feels _so good_.

"O-okay Lex," he hears. "Okay. It's... okay. We won't go out that way."

Lex ducks his head and buries it in Clark's chest and sighs, relaxes, Clark's secret is safe, and they stand there, swaying together and breathing for awhile.

He's not sure how long, but it doesn't matter, because there are no guards and Clark is here.

"...Lex?" he hears finally, and Lex twitches and blinks his eyes open, raises his head. "You okay?"

"I'm tired," he tells Clark. "I ran a lot." He frowns. "And they drugged me." He pulls away a bit and tenses, has to regain his footing because he'd relaxed a little too much for standing, then looks up at Clark. "I'm drugged," he tells Clark, because it is important for Clark to know that.

"Okay," Clark tells him.

"Once we're out of here and have escaped good and properly, I need to rest."

"Okay," says Clark.

"And maybe eat something."

"Okay," Clark says quietly.

Lex starts to move away and pauses. "And you should eat something too."

Clark just smiles at him a little bit.

It's good when Clark smiles. It makes Lex feel good. Lex smiles back.

Lex and Clark walk along.

It is very quiet. Lex doesn't like that. Since there are no guards, Lex can be loud and talk, right?

"We're going this way because Ian is smart," Lex explains as they walk along. "He wouldn't double-back and risk having to deal with more guards if he didn't have to. He would only move to places to get closer and closer to escaping. And there is plenty of electricity upstairs to zap people with, if he wanted to go outside upstairs. So this way is the way out for escaping. Properly."

"Why didn't you come this way before?" Clark asks him.

"I didn't know about this way before," Lex says honestly. "It's not like Ian told me."

They turn another corner and then they see it.

They walk up to it, and Lex smiles.

"It's easier to bring in large, complex machinery in one piece, isn't it?" Lex tells Clark, as he drops Clarks hand and walks up to the huge metal loading-bay-sized double-doors set in the side of the wall.

He places the palms of his hand flat against the doors. They're a bit cooler than the air around them.

He turns back to Clark and waits patiently.

Clark walks forward, and Lex moves aside.

Clark breaks every padlock and chain on the doors that are holding them shut between them, all the way down, while Lex looks on in fascination. All five of them bend and twist and come apart like taffy, even though they sound like grinding, shrieking steel.

"Does it hurt?" Lex asks him, curious, and looks up at him. Clark seems startled by the thought. "Is that a no?"

Clark smiles along with Lex, as he pulls the slide bolt free. "It doesn't hurt," he tells Lex, as he reaches out and shoves open the door.

Lex peers inside, then steps in and around the door.

"Tunnels," he says. And they are -- long, concrete tunnels. One big one, and at least one or two intersections farther down before the sides disappear into the gloom. They look like they might go a long way out. There doesn't seem to be any light at the end of it.

"How far do you think they go?" Clark asks him, as he wanders in himself.

"No idea," Lex says. He turns and looks up at Clark with a bright, happy, excited grin at being confronted with a new and interesting unknown. "Want to find out?"

Clark huffs a breath out at him, but he's smiling again.

He turns and pulls the doors closed behind them.

~*~*~*~*~*~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: ...Yes, I realize that I could have just had Lex 'win' this by kicking Ian's ass (and then other Ian's ass) and then grabbing Clark and running off into the sunset with him, but where would be the fun in that?
> 
> Also, you have no idea how hard it is for me to write in present tense and keep the verb tense straight, you guys. I kept falling back into past tense (and I'm sure I missed a few). Graaah. *chews at tablecloth*


	5. There are no real consequences for breaking the law, Part 1 (Lex Luthor, Clark Kent)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This DC-mandate is the one that states that the criminal justice system is ineffective, untrustworthy, or otherwise corrupt in the extreme. When (not if) any of the primary or secondary characters commit misdemeanors, felonies, or otherwise break the law on-screen, the offense tends to be glossed over, up to and including killing someone in almost all cases (self-defense or otherwise), with very few exceptions, and nobody "important" who _does_ get sent to jail stays in jail for very long, if they even get sent to jail in the first place.
> 
> More ranting in the chapter area below on this one, because these author's note areas can only hold so much text ^_^;;
> 
> Character voices: Lex Luthor, Clark Kent
> 
> (Transcript used as a reference to canon events is available [here](http://tvmegasite.net/prime/shows/smallville/transcripts/season6/6-11.shtml). Some dialogue was stolen wholesale or only minorly modified from the episode.)

~*~*~*~*~*~

As sad and frustrating as it is, I can understand why some of the Smallville gang starts trying to take matters into their own hands more and more often as the series progresses. Seriously, the criminal justice system in the Smallville universe is **broken**. For instance...

\-- Lionel is sent to jail, and then prison(!), for colluding with Morgan Edge to kill his own parents for insurance money ...and then gets pardoned by the mayor in short order, because Veritas witches want him out.

\-- Lex is pulled into jail under false pretenses (with malice aforethought) when Lana fakes her death and Bizarro-Clark breaks him out. (Oh, and Lana doesn't get in trouble for bringing that about. Or for the multiple times she tries to flat-out kill Lex on multiple other occasions.)

\-- Jonathan is framed for Lionel's attempted murder and sent to jail, and he's out days later only due to Clark's efforts and investigations, not those of the police. Also, he was framed in the first place by the town sheriff, despite the fact that Ethan had been his friend for years. (Oh, and later two other police officers nearly kill Lana and Lex because they think Lex disappeared the Black Ship and they're mad that no-one else will believe them that the Black Ship exists.)

\-- The main cast gets mind-controlled or otherwise manipulated into trying to kill each other on a regular basis, more often than not with witnesses about, and nobody gets charges filed against them. (Protip: the state can file charges even if the victim decides not to for whatever reason, y'know.)

\-- Oliver kills Lex with one of Toyman's bombs (...or one of his clones, they were never completely clear on that point, except in that 'killing Lex good and dead' was what Oliver was absolutely intending as an outcome, and this after several months of attempting to track Lex down like an animal, trying to do just that), and the only one who seems to have a huge, unresolvable problem with this is Toyman himself. Chloe 'redeems' Oliver by extremely manipulative and dubious methods, and Clark cuts Oliver a break after Toyman tries to get revenge because Oliver's feeling suicidal; then, for reasons we can't explain, everybody acts like it never happened. (Oh, and long before that whole mess, Oliver does manage to kill Lex with an arrow to the gut, but he ends up getting a free pass on that one because he was high at the time and Clark was able to use a healing serum to bring Lex back to life. And there's that time that Oliver hired somebody to kidnap and torture Lex, too, after Lex was possessed by Zod because he(/Oliver) wanted to know how Lex did it / what happened; worse, Lana also got pulled into it, and Clark ended up having to rescue them (Lex and Lana) both from _burning alive_ in an otherwise-assured fiery death... and Oliver never got caught.)

\-- Lex kills Lionel and, as much as I feel for him and his whole completely effed up family situation, he doesn't "get caught" (by the police) either -- one of his people dies shortly after getting rid of the sole piece of damning photographic evidence against him, and the woman nearly kills Jimmy and Lois in the process of getting it back.

\-- Zod gets sent to the Phantom Zone, and gets a new body in newly-sentenced clone-Zod and ends up ruling the whole damn place like a warlord-king.

\-- Clark wears red-K for almost a solid summer, and treats the city of Metropolis as his own, personal playground as the Urban Legend. He steals from banks, gets into fights constantly, and only by the grace of god somehow doesn't manage to kill anyone outright. Jonathan forces him off the red-K (more-or-less) and drags him back home, and they get past the immediate issues with Morgan Edge, but they don't actually discuss any of it at all. There's one throwaway line about how Clark made an anonymous call to the police to pick up (what was left of) his stash from all his various robberies, and past that everything more-or-less gets swept under the rug. He never really gets taken to task for any of it.

\-- All of Lionel's ongoing schemes, blackmail, various reporters and police officers in his pocket and whatnot, as well as trying to have Lex brainwashed and/or killed multiple times; and all that doesn't even begin to touch up everything that happened with his criminal 'friend' Morgan Edge.

\-- The existence of Intergang in the first frikking place, let alone Checkmate.

The list goes on and on.

I know that superhero worlds in fiction that promote vigilantism are supposed to have some element of broken justice which the heroes/vigilantes "must" step in to fill, but come _on_ people!

~*~*~*~*~*~

He'd set his trap at a building only tangentially related to Project 33.1 near Metropolis -- at least, as far as anything in the less secure LuthorCorp databases he owned implied… like the one on his personal laptop computer. He'd done it so close in to the city because he’d wanted to be able to be there, to walk in on the bastard he'd caught red-handed, if his trap actually worked.

And it had worked. He'd caught himself a speedster.

Lex knew the little two-bit thief, too. Bart Allen. He'd stolen from Lex before.

Corporate espionage with the sort of software he'd been packing on that USB thumb drive, however, was well above this little punk's paygrade. Someone was funding him, and Lex wanted to know who.

He stared down at the kid, sprawled out on the cold concrete floor from the tasing he'd received -- the contact boobytrap on the USB port the kid had tried to jack into had laid him out like Lex had hoped -- and Lex mulled over whether or not he really ought to go through with his original plan.

He'd had the security footage from the previous break-in analyzed, but even his best people could only get so much data from a single photograph. He'd had a lot of equipment for measuring high-speed particles brought in to the Ridge Facility on the outskirts of Metropolis, though, a cage ready-made...

...but he hadn't exactly expected to be netting a _teenager_. Maybe he should have. Enough of the other 33.1 subjects were. ...Well, the ones who already came in with powers and abilities beyond most people's ken, anyway. So maybe he _should_ have expected it.

His guards grabbed the body of the unconscious teenaged kid up off of the floor and helped the medical personnel sedate him with enough tranquilizer to keep a small bull elephant down. They searched the teen, tossed his pockets, and quickly loaded him up onto a medical gurney. By the time they'd finished tying him down and had started to cart him in the direction of the loading bay, Lex following along in their wake, he was already losing that heady feeling of triumph. And as the flush of success faded away, the feeling he was left with was one that was bore far more of a close resemblance to acutely discomfort than anything else, and the feeling only got stronger with each passing second.

 _What am I doing?_ he found himself thinking, and he grimaced and glanced away from the procession. He found it easier to focus on the walls than the gurney and the kid as his group moved forward, and that was downright disturbing to him.

...Not that the feeling wasn’t justifiable in some sense. He'd honestly been expecting some hardened criminal, given the way the corporate espionage had been going down. It should have been a grown adult, not this idiot. Scaring some dumb kid into talking with electric shock torture wasn't exactly his idea of a good time, either. Yes, he was well and truly pissed off that this little punk has stolen from him, broken into six of his facilities in the past month -- all related to 33.1 activities, which struck a _very_ sensitive nerve with him -- and yes, he wanted this freak as a test subject -- _badly_ \-- but... was throwing him in a shock cage and running him ragged really the best way to go about it?

And should he really be considering, even for a second, taking the kid to the same warehouse that housed the central mainframe for the 33.1 project, the very thing that the teen had seemed to be looking for in the first place, just to taunt him with the fact that he’d finally gotten to where he’d wanted to be, only not?

...And didn't this seem just a little too easy?

Lex shook his head. _I can't believe I'm having second thoughts about this._ He'd _won_ , and soon he'd be in the perfect position to wring every last detail of this ongoing corporate espionage operation out of this stupid punk kid, while simultaneously getting some hard data on someone who he _really_ wanted to use as a test subject at the same time -- regardless of what said test subject had to say on the matter -- and he was _still_ second-guessing himself.

Except... all he'd be doing today -- all he _could_ do today, at the Ridge facility -- would be to gather preliminary data on the kid's abilities. ...And what would he do with him afterwards? He hadn't ever taken unwilling test subjects into the 33.1 program. --Forcibly expelled them from it, sure, but _introduced_ them into it?

...This _really_ wasn't a good idea. Nobody who could be talked around broke into six -- now seven -- facilities, all his, and stole sensitive material using specialized gear and sophisticated technology like this. Either this kid had a grudge, or his employer did and the kid was happy to go along with it. So Lex had serious doubts that the teen would cooperate willingly upon reawakening. Thus, forcibly running tests on him -- which was far less than optimal in terms of the amount of gathered data one could collect, compared to what working with a willing subject could produce -- would still be better than _nothing_. And even if the kid seemed to have an abrupt change of heart, it would be far too risky to bring the kid into the 33.1 project, given how he'd been caught. Unwillingly, to say the least.

So what _would_ he have to do with him, afterwards, after forcibly performing tests on him that would make _anyone_ unwilling to cooperate for any LuthorCorp project afterwards, for _any_ reason?

...Or, rather, the more realistic question would be: what would be the only available options remaining to Lex for dealing with the teenager, after having made him into an unwilling test subject?

Lex remembered what his father had said earlier, and his own knee-jerk reaction to argue against Lionel, and anything he said. _Am I actually **agreeing** with that old bastard?_ Lex asked himself. Was experimenting on the kid really such a bad idea, especially considering what he had already done?

Lex found himself still having second-thoughts as his little procession of spy and watchful personnel made it to the loading bay and given past experience, that didn’t bode well.

Lex tilted his head back up towards the ceiling, closed his eyes, then dropped his head down again and pinched the bridge of his nose.

 _Forget Lionel. Just... forget him._ He needed to focus on the present. The present, and what he knew _now_.

Because this wasn't just one highly-skilled, highly-trained individual with a personal vendetta, working for themselves and selling their skills to the highest bidder. This was a directed effort. That changed _everything_ , because there was now also the issue of this little brat's corporate employer, who almost certainly knew where he was at the moment -- or would until Lex moved him. The kid couldn't be doing this alone, and he doubted the kid was working alone, without a safety net, or at least a handler. Lex himself wouldn't trust a teen operative to just choose their own targets and report back later, no matter how 'gifted' they were (...if he'd been inclined to use a teenager who was a low-level petty thief for such a job in the first place, that is, which he wasn't). Stopping one thief wouldn't stop the employer -- not when it was the employer who was directly ordering and managing the actions being taken. They'd just hire another thief, and another, and another, until... they got what they wanted.

"Wait," Lex told his guards, as they began to load gurney-and-kid up into one of the unmarked vans. They paused, and he shook his head and grimaced; he _hated_ changing his mind mid-stream. "That's not enough. We're going with plan B."

Plan B was moving him elsewhere. Plan A was doing preliminary testing on him at a secure location and -- while technically this required ‘moving him elsewhere’ as a precursor -- plan A was supposed to precede the original plan B. Moving the speedster was a greater risk than keeping him safely locked him up on the premises of a LuthorCorp site -- beyond the initial risk of getting him moved to a site that was far more securely guarded than this throwaway location, anyway -- and every time Lex moved him he would be creating a greater possibility for breakout and escape. But...

...Lex had no idea when the punk kid was supposed to report back in. Worse, this was a speedster he was dealing with, and the kid hadn't exactly spent very long on the premises of any of the _other_ facilities. His report-in deadline could have already passed, minutes ago. Lex also didn't know if the teen might still have any tracers or other communication devices on him that they might not be able to detect, besides the obvious earpiece his security staff had removed from his person. Lord knew, if the kid had been given software that could hack LuthorCorp systems like the ones he already had, he might have other tech on him that was also a generation beyond what they could deal with, let alone recognize.

Maybe he was being overly paranoid, but that was really what decided it for him.

Lex waved one of the doctors over. "Hook him up to an additional IV unit with a sedative, enough to keep down a... _small_ gorilla," Lex ordered. After all, they could lower the dosage later if they needed to, and Lex didn't want to risk a heightened metabolism clearing the drug faster than they expected. Not on-route. "Add metal restraints, not just cloth ones, and connect him up an EEG and a crash cart. He so much as twitches or looks like he's coming awake, hit him with high voltage, low amperage, enough to put him back under."

Hopefully, that'd be enough overkill to keep him under control. They knew that an electric shock already worked, after all, even if they didn't know if metal restraints would be strong enough to hold this freak kid. Hopefully, the change in brainwave pattern would be slow enough due to the drugs that they could shock him before he got himself loose.

The key word there being _hopefully_.

 _Even considering taking him to the Ridge Facility was such a bad idea,_ Lex thought, as the doctors hurried to bring about his orders, and he rethought exactly what he wanted to do with this stupid teenager. Of course, his first, knee-jerk, 'hold him in a remote and unremarkable cell and torture him there, instead' idea wasn't much better, now that the flush of anger and scientific curiosity had been tempered with a little less immediacy. Not to mention the operational security issues with what the kid might see, carting him in and out of any secure LuthorCorp facility -- let alone that one! --if it turned out that they weren't able to keep him under for long.

He waved a security guard over as the medical staff stopped what they were doing and instead began prepping the speedster for a longer, more secure vehicular transit. "After you finish stripping this location, I want the mainframe at the Ridge Facility taken offline -- up to and including a power-down and physical disconnect, you understand? -- and all the rest of the computers and connections to the premises scrubbed, those computer terminals reset."

The guard began to protest. "But sir, we caught--!"

"Every facility that's been hit so far has been compromised," Lex overrode him, brooking no argument. He understood the man's feeling of damaged pride; the man had been the security chief at one of the other hacked facilities, prior to being transferred to the Ridge Facility in order to improve its vulnerabilities from what he'd learned from experience, the hard way, that had been problems elsewhere. But…

"The only way we were able to catch this thief this time was the fact that he happened to use a terminal in the same way he did during the previous break-ins,” Lex reminded him. “We wouldn't have been able to stop him, otherwise. And for all we know, more operatives like this one may be en-route." The possibility of being ambushed en-route would be bad enough; the last thing they needed right now would be to end up being followed to the Ridge Facility.

The security chief didn't exactly look very happy with him. "Shutting down and isolating the mainframe alone will take hours, sir, let alone the rest of it."

"I know," Lex sighed. "Hopefully, we'll have enough time to secure the Ridge servers against both external and internal intrusion from locally-connected systems, before we have to deal with an influx of data from the next work-day cycle." That would be messy as hell. It was a necessary precaution, though, given the circumstances. Lex had no idea who might be sent next, or what the timeframe might be for that next incursion -- and there would be another one, no doubt. The kid might be his employer’s only ace-in-the-hole, but he also might not be, and they wouldn’t know the capabilities of the next free agent until they were hit again.

If the project’s central mainframe was powered down before then, though, the entire system would be far more difficult to hack. With that safeguard in play, even if the Ridge Facility itself was targeted, someone wanting what was stored in the central database would have to literally _dismantle_ the mainframe to get at the drives, extract them from the system and physically cart them off elsewhere -- and those drives were nothing so much as gibberish outside of the specialized, custom LuthorCorp hardware that housed them, surprise, surprise. The only viable method for getting at the data at that point would involve the thieves having to bring the mainframe back online first in order to hack it at that point -- which someone would definitely notice. It would also require an uninterrupted supply of power to keep it up and running -- building power which his security staff could take out if they had to, to stop that from happening.

Regardless, it would mean that the powered-down mainframe would _not_ be able to be cracked into from a connected machine in real-time, no matter what hacking software someone might hope to use. "At least whoever sent this thief will come sniffing around here first, trying to find out what happened to him, before looking elsewhere. That should buy your people some time to get the mainframe down and disconnected properly, at the very least." Lex grimaced. "Unfortunately, the Ridge Facility is listed as a LuthorCorp property, and we haven't been able to completely predict their pattern of choosing which targets to hit next, except for the fact that they are listed as main LuthorCorp properties. They’re going to hit it sooner or later, if we can’t identify and neutralize them first. We don't know if we just got lucky that they took the bait this time, or not."

"Anything else, sir?"

Lex paused, then nodded. "Get me the security footage from this place before we go -- two copies, as well as the originals -- and have one copy of the footage sent to our technical staff at the main office, along with the USB device the spy tried to use." They sorely needed to beef up their computer security, post-haste, and the best way to do that would be by analyzing the actual code the attack vector used, assuming that the boobytrap hadn’t completely fried it and there _was_ something still left to recover from it.

"I know it's going to make things more difficult in the short-term to shut down that mainframe,” Lex said. “And I know that forcing all the project servers to run in isolated mode at all the various project centers is suboptimal, especially from a coordination standpoint," he admitted to his chief of security for the Ridge Facility, thinking out loud. The guard nodded along with him in his peripheral vision, and Lex continued. "But it also restricts our vulnerability to acceptable levels. With the project mainframe offline, one project center getting hacked means that they won't get everything, only the files at that particular branch.”

Lex sighed and scrubbed at his eyes with his fingers. “We can consider bringing the 33.1 mainframe back online and reintegrating everything again _after_ we've come up with new electronic countermeasures, ones that we have at least some assurances from the IT department on, that will work," _at least against what we already know about_. "I don't want to risk the entire project being compromised just because a few spies happen to get lucky with a hacking tool we can't stop." _Yet._ His people were good, they’d been working on a solution since the first registered break-in, and with the USB device itself now in-hand, they should be able to complete something soon. Hopefully.

Setting up the trap in the first place had been a calculated risk in the first place, one that Lex didn’t want to keep on taking if he didn’t have to. It was high time he take those measures while he still had the time left to take them.

"Yes, sir." The guard nodded to him, then professionally turned right around and started barking orders.

Lex left him to it. By the time the medical staff had his little spy trussed up to the nines properly, and he'd finally decided how he wanted to have this play out, one of the security staff had arrived with the footage. Lex took it, then climbed into the unmarked van as they finished securing the speedster. He took in a deep breath, mentally committed himself to his decision on their final destination, and flipped open his cellphone, making a very necessary phone call along the way.

The driver, medical personnel, and abbreviated security guard detail who had come with him -- and thus could hear his side of the phone conversation -- weren't exactly... well, _happy_ wasn't the right word for how they'd feel on a good day _either_ , but...

Well, neither was Lex.

This was the best alternative he could think of under the circumstances, though, as much as he hated to admit it.

\-----

Lex’s personal assistant showed up promptly in a company car, arriving with the files he needed just as Lex and his contingent pulled up to the parking lot of the nearest branch of the Metropolis Police Department in their van.

Lex jumped out and took charge immediately, accosting the first police officer he saw. "Get me the captain, please." One of the two he’d approached, the younger of the set, took off and disappeared into the station on his own initiative.

"What the hell...?" said one of the on-duty beat cops, and Lex hid a grimace as they started to gain a crowd of boys-in-blue gawkers, and a handful of detectives all but poured through the double-doors at the front of the station and began to converge on their location. Worse, there was already grumbling from those gathered who weren't in his employ. When one of them spoke up and said, "Hey, that's a kid!" was when Lex knew he needed to start doing some serious damage control.

Lex sighed and glanced over his shoulder at the prone, restrained speedster. "I know," Lex told them all. "And I hate to say this," Lex added as they unloaded the IV drip, and the crash cart that was all-too-likely going to have to serve as a last-resort containment measure, "but I’m afraid these are necessary precautions." He sighed as he waved at it all. "He's much more dangerous than he looks, and even all this may not be enough to hold him."

"What the hell is going on here?" Lex heard, and he turned towards the police captain in charge of the station. He didn't exactly look happy about being accosted just then, and Lex could fully understand why, given the timing. Late-shift was about to start; he was keeping the man from going home.

"I'm sorry for the theater of this, Captain," Lex began, "But this... teen... has been committing corporate espionage against LuthorCorp over the course of about six months, now; we finally caught him today, in the process of hacking our databases after breaking into yet another secure LuthorCorp facility. If I'd simply called you to ask for assistance or a police escort, and the APB had gone out over the scanner, his handler might have caught wise to the fact that we'd caught him and tried to send someone to stop us en-route. ...And, I'm sorry to say it, but I also thought it would be easier for us to bring him to you, than for you to come to us. I doubt that you have this sort of gear on hand, to keep him contained." Lex let himself show the grimace he'd been holding back.

"You're kidding," Lex heard from one of the uniformed officers. "You can't even keep a kid out of your buildings?"

Lex ignored the jibe, continuing to address the captain instead. "This thief has hit six other LuthorCorp facilities prior to this and we weren't even able to slow him down," Lex admitted. "Literally." He turned to his assistant and motioned at the files, and she pulled out the blurry security cam picture from the previous break-in. She handed it to Lex, and Lex handed it over.

The captain took the picture from him and frowned at it. A few other officers crowded around to take a peek.

"We were... somewhat able to catch him on tape a little better this time," Lex offered, holding up one of the copies of the security footage from the Ridge Facility. "I know this may sound... less than plausible..." he began.

The captain just grimaced and shook his head. "Maybe to some other department, in some other city," Lex was told, and a good number of the police around him shared matching frowns -- or glares. They weren't directed at him either; they were directed at the photograph. The captain straightened his shoulders and said, "With all due respect, Mr. Luthor, after all the lunacy we had to deal with from the Urban Legend throwing his weight around, using _our_ city as his own personal playground, I'm not about to wave something like this off," he said as he handed the photo back over to Lex’s assistant. More than a few muted growls surfaced at his words.

Lex stared at the police captain blankly, though. He couldn’t not. "...The _what?_ "

The captain looked at him oddly, then shook his head. "Right, you weren’t here for that. You were marooned on an island that summer or something, weren't you?"

"That's a pretty good alibi," someone piped in, which got a few chuckles.

Lex glanced around, and realized that he was going to have to do some serious additional research after this. Anything that got this many police officers riled up generally wasn't a good sign, and now he was itching to know what in the hell he'd missed that summer, stuck out on that accursed island.

What he said, though, was, "If you could, please show my personnel where to move the criminal to, to secure him in a cell. I'd like to make sure you know exactly what you're dealing with before I have my people leave him solely in your custody."

He held out one of the copies of the relevant tape, and the police captain took it.

"That, we can do," the captain said. "Matthews, show Mr. Luthor's people in." The captain glowered at the tape. "I'd like to know what we're dealing with, too."

No one's moods had improved any, by the time everyone was inside, Allen was firmly ensconced in a cell, and the tape had finished playing. If anything, the police were even less happy than before, and given that half the senior officers in the department had been congregated around the monitor...

Lex sat on the corner of a nearby table, arms crossed, and tried not to frown at the television set.

"...Think this kid might be the Legend?" one of the detectives piped up, after the short, silent viewing session.

"If this is him, we're not going to be able to hold him," the captain said with suppressed anger, staring at the screen.

"The Legend shrugged off bullets; this one drops when he gets electrocuted," Lex heard, and if he'd had hair on the back of his neck, it would have been standing on end.

He forced himself to maintain outwardly calm.

"...We have an IV line in him," Lex said slowly, "so I doubt this one is bulletproof," he agreed. Though, admittedly that didn't exactly leave him feeling any more secure about the metal restraints and the cell bars. The Emily Dinsmore clone was the only other speedster he'd been aware of before this one, and... "That doesn't necessarily mean that anything other than tasing him or keeping him drugged might work to keep him subdued, though. For all we know, he might be able to vibrate his body through the restraints, or even the walls themselves." There was a very real possibility that physical restraints might have no staying power. And the efficacy of the drug worried him, too.

"We need to be able to have him awake to question him," the captain said under his breath, giving Lex a sidelong look.

"I know," Lex responded just as quietly. "I can have my people put together a high-speed sensing system that can probably react quickly enough to shock him if he tries to use his speed while he's conscious, but I can't guarantee that it'll be enough to work, either."

The captain took in a breath and looked downright annoyed. Lex didn't blame him; he was dropping one hell of a problem into the police captain's lap.

One of the other officers picked up the remote and replayed the tape again, from the beginning.

"...Is this even real?" another detective said incredulously, which prompted glowers all around.

"Ignore him; he's a transfer from Kansas City," the captain said offhandedly, turning back to Lex.

Lex considered it a fair point, though. "This video was taken from high-speed cameras, similar to the ones we had at the sixth break-in," Lex told them. "We could try running it at quarter speed and progressing through the frames one at a time. We've upgraded our equipment, so we should have caught him streaking in again, not just appearing." _Maybe even on more than one frame,_ he thought, thinning his lips.

They did that, and did.

"Damn," he heard one of the crowd of detectives mutter, staring at the image on-screen.

"Damn indeed," said the captain grimly.

 _We got lucky,_ Lex admitted, if only to himself. Given the framerate on the video... If anything, the original speed estimates his people had given him had probably been _low_.

"Get your people to get me something to keep this bastard in check," the captain told him.

Lex's breath caught, and then he nodded slowly.

\-----

Lex's staff had come through. He couldn't use any sort of meteor-power suppression device on the teenaged speedster -- they were too bulky, and he had no idea if one would even work on the teen, let alone the problematic questions that might result from him having something like that on-hand in the first place -- but his people had been able to make up a shock collar with several remotes that didn't pack much more electricity that a normal taser would.

There was no dial for changing the power setting. It was set to incapacitate with no lasting damage. The remotes could only turn it on and off. The key for actually taking it off was handed off to the captain and locked in a safe in his office that only he had the combination for, along with a second collar in case the first one was used and discharged before they could come up with a better solution. The remotes were locked in his desk, and required a keycode to operate.

It wasn't ideal, but it was what they had.

They'd put the teen in his own cell, at least one cell away from one with anyone else in it. They'd had to. They unhooked and removed the improved crash cart 'taser' and the IV, and replaced it with the shock collar. ...Not in that order. They'd removed the restraints and moved the teen from the gurney to the cot along the back wall, and removed the gurney. The police had put handcuffs on him, but they'd all come to the conclusion that if he could get out of any restraints, it wouldn't matter, and if he couldn't, then anything beyond handcuffs and the cell bars was likely overkill.

They'd waited a few hours, the medical staff monitoring the teen's progress, and when it looked like the kid would be out for the night at least, they'd given up and gone home, leaving behind strict instructions about skilled thieves and lock-picking, pick-pocketing and sleight of hand and superspeed, to the night-shift.

Lex came back in the morning, and nodded a hello to the police captain. He was escorted to the cellblock, and given a chair upon request.

Lex sat down in front of the bars, and he waited.

Finally, after another half-hour or so, the teen finally stirred. He groaned a bit and sat up.

Lex crossed his legs and smiled. "Morning, sunshine."

"What the..." the teen said as he reached up and grabbed at the shock collar around his neck. "Oh, hell no."

Lex smiled. "This doesn't have to get unpleasant, you know."

The next words out of the kid's mouth were, "I want a lawyer."

Lex’s smile went a little thin. "And maybe you'll actually get one if you're lucky," Lex told him, because lord knew what federal spook agency might love to disappear the kid without a trial, just to take him apart. "Who do you work for?"

"What you see is what you get, there, Goldilocks," the stupid kid told him.

Lex took ahold of his anger with both mental hands. Instead, he sighed outwardly and shook his head. "You're a low-level thief. Swiping corporate data isn't your style."

The kid glanced around. "This isn't actually a jail cell." He grinned. "You're just trying to scare me."

"Yes, it is a jail cell," Lex told him. "And you're absolutely right; I **am** trying to scare you. Now, tell me who you're working for, and, like I said, this won't have to get unpleasant."

"Alright, alright. I work for a guy called Mr. Kiss-my-butt. Would you like me to introduce you?"

Lex levelled a look at him. When the smart-ass punk continued to grin at him, he shoved his hand into his pocket and pulled out one of the remote control devices.

Then the buzzer for the cell block sounded, and Lex froze in place, then gritted his teeth. Footsteps came in, and a hand was held out near his arm.

Lex handed over the remote.

"I see you have more of these," the police captain told him.

"It's probably a good thing you came in here," Lex said cooly, leaning back in his chair. "I might have been about to lose my temper."

"My guy on-duty noticed," the captain said dryly.

"Seriously, isn't impersonating a police officer a crime?" the kid joked, leaning against the back wall.

The captain looked on at him blandly.

"He _is_ a police officer," Lex informed the brat.

Silence drew out, as the kid looked the captain in the eye, then glanced around, and the teen finally started to look a little bit nervous.

"...Okay," said the kid. He turned to the police officer and brought up his chin, declaring, "I want a lawyer."

"I don't have to give you one."

"Oh, yeah? Why not," the teen said smugly, folding his arms. He seemed sure that he'd caught them out in some sort of lie, or refusal of his rights. Except...

"You haven't had formal charges filed against you yet," the police captain informed him, looking down at Lex with a very long gaze.

"I was trying to give him a chance to dig himself out of the hole he's made for himself," Lex told the captain. To the teen, he said, "You can be held in the tank for up to twenty-four hours under suspicion without having charges filed. I thought it might be prudent to give you a chance to speak in your own defense before I had to do anything... drastic."

"Any reduction in his sentence or plea bargaining is under the supervision and purview of the DA's office," the captain reminded him a bit harshly.

"Assuming I file charges in the first place," said Lex. "Which I might reconsider doing, if _someone_ tells me who he is working for," Lex said, directing the last at the thief in question.

"Yeah, right," the kid muttered.

" _Hell_ , no," the police captain cut in. "This kid is a public menace just waiting to happen. I am not letting him back out onto the streets; not on my watch. If you're not filing charges, the state sure as hell will! I'll make sure of that."

"I suppose that means that he has two people who he'd like to make his new best friends, then," Lex said neutrally, trying not to grit his teeth. He sorely wished he'd heard of the clashes between this 'Urban Legend' and the Metropolis police force _before_ he'd brought the teen in. It had left him with a lot less bargaining room. He’d thought he might have to all-but-bargain with the police to listen to him and _keep_ the teen behind bars -- **not** the other way around. His plans were all now a bit off-kilter because of it.

The kid glanced between them, then shoved his back up against the wall flush and snorted at them both. He crossed his arms. "Look, I don't know what line this guy has been feeding you, but I'm underage and he kidnapped me."

Lex and the police captain both turned and stared at the kid.

Lex found himself well and truly speechless.

The police captain had no such problem, as he looked down his nose at the speedster and said, "Really. _That's_ what you're going with, kid?"

The teen ticked up his chin again. "It's my word against his, and he kidnapped me." He looked a little smug. "You've got no evidence otherwise, am I right?"

"Actually, no, I do," said Lex. "I have videotape of you, arriving on the premises and then attempting your hack job, and it's more than just a few frames."

"Bull," said the kid.

Lex listed off his entry route.

The kid paled a bit.

"Doesn't mean anything," the kid blustered. "You're bluffing. You've got nothing, and I'm under eighteen. I'll get a speedy trial, and be right out. Worst-case, somebody tries to stick me in juvie hall."

"You really have no idea how much trouble you're in, do you." Lex considered him for a moment, like a bug under a magnifying glass. "Do you even _know_ what they were having you steal?"

The kid glared at him. ...Well, fair enough. Maybe he felt threatened by the fact that 33.1 existed -- that _some_ people with powers actually _wanted_ to work within the system, after breaking the law and getting caught by it.

"Last chance to convince me not to file charges," Lex told the teen, standing up.

Silence.

Lex shrugged it off. This wasn't his lookout, as it were, and it wasn't as though he considered it to be his sole responsibility to keep every last powered individual out there under surveillance and control. "Well, maybe you'll feel more talkative when you get tired of sitting in jail," he said. "I wouldn't recommend trying to use your speed though," Lex told him.

"Yeah? Why," the kid challenged, eyeing him with a hard glint in his eye.

Lex bent forward slightly to pick up his chair. "Because--"

He was cut off by a short, loud scream, and then a thump.

Lex looked up.

"How close did he get to grabbing me?" Lex asked the police chief casually, as the kid silently jerked and spasmed on the floor from the electric shock the device was still pouring into his limbs. It had another second or two to go, and then the electricity cut out and the speedster collapsed completely, panting for breath.

The police chief was pale, his complexion tinged almost grey. He shook his head once, staring down at the kid.

Lex took that to be an 'I don't know, I didn't even see him move,' which he supposed _would_ be accurate, considering.

"It's all right," Lex told the police chief, as he picked up the chair and started to walk away. "I measured the distance to the cell before I sat down. I had a good six inches clearance from either his hands or his feet at full extension," he explained calmly. "I've no desire to have my face meet any iron bars at speeds upwards of two-hundred miles per hour, certainly not anytime soon."

The police captain stared after him, then chuckled weakly and walked him out of the cell block.

They left the teen behind, groaning, sprawled out insensate on the floor, his handcuffed hands extended between the bars of his cell where he’d shoved his arms out to grab at Lex only to fall short, fingers still twitching.

\-----

"Sir!" his assistant said urgently, holding her phone as she shoved her way into the conference room. Lex glanced up from the table where he and some of the others had been discussing the little problem sitting in one of their jail cells, determining what guidelines they'd need to follow for everyone's safety, and how to keep said little problem properly contained... possibly even humanely. (The shock collar clearly hadn't activated quickly enough to keep said problem from moving at least a good two yards forward before dropping him, and that starting from a seated position.) "Sir!" she repeated. They all turned towards her. "It's the facility!"

"What?" Lex said, leaning back in his chair and frowning in confusion. "Which facility?"

"The Ridge Facility!" she said. "The head of security just called!"

"Was that where--" the captain began, and Lex shook his head quickly, glancing over at him.

"No, the thief hit a different facility within the city limits; that one's on the docks, at the edge of the city. He was in charge of the operation that managed to capture the thief in custody, though," Lex explained, not understanding why she was so upset. He turned back to her. "Did he find something else out? What did he say?"

"Sonofabitch, you catch another one?" he heard one of the officers mutter, clearly unhappy about the one they'd already got.

"No, sir, you don't understand," she told him almost desperately. "The Ridge Facility is under attack!"

" _WHAT?!_ " Lex blurted out, standing up abruptly, as did the rest of the room.

"They've already taken out all the security cameras in the complex, and so far they've taken out every guard they've come across, armed or not; on-site security reports that there's at least three of the intruders, maybe four," his assistant said. "They're professionals."

The captain whipped around to Lex immediately. "Those other facilities--"

"They were break-ins," Lex said, in something akin to shock. "Just break-ins. Snatch-and-grab jobs; that's all," he heard himself say.

"Well, it looks like somebody decided to escalate," said one of the detectives, as they all headed for the door in a rush.

Lex shook himself out of it. He didn't have time for this, to be caught out flat-footed.

"Tell them to evacuate the building," Lex told his assistant, hanging behind for the moment. A phone call would travel faster than he could, at the moment. "Shut everything down that can be safely and then get the hell out." The facility's security was top-notch, but certainly not meant to withstand a siege from the next best thing to an elite special-forces unit, which is what the attackers sounded like from the description he'd been given -- neither his assistant nor his security chief were ones to embellish.

"Tell them to take out the emergency generators if they can, then cut power to the building from the outside," Lex continued. It wasn't as if they had control of the building surveillance anymore, so they might as well make it useless for the attackers, as well. "Have our people establish an outside perimeter if possible and help them coordinate with the police." And with that, she got out of the way and started relaying his orders into her phone.

"You took one of their crew," the captain pointed out grimly, jaw set, as he exited the room and surveyed the dispatch area, watching his squad captains shouted orders to gear up and get en-route to the building that was _under attack_. "That must've pissed somebody off."

"A crew." Lex cursed under his breath as he strode out the door after the captain, his assistant a step behind him. "I had a feeling the teen was working for someone," Lex told the captain bitterly, "but **nothing** like this." This was like flipping over a rock expecting a worm, or maybe a biting beetle or two of middling size at best, and instead getting attacked by an entire hornet's nest worth of stinging violent madness!

"The kid's a petty _thief_ ,” Lex all-but-complained. “He's stolen from me before -- personal items, not LuthorCorp property; they were completely different circumstances," Lex explained quickly at the captain's sudden sharp look, "-- no, I didn't file charges, and no, I didn't know he was that fast back then." _Assuming he was that fast back then._ Lex grimaced. "His name, under all of the aliases, is Bart Allen, and he simply doesn't have the necessary skills to pull off a high-profile espionage job like the one he pulled; not on his own."

"You didn't think to share this before?" he was asked.

"I apologize for leaving that out earlier. I didn't want to bias you too much," Lex told him quietly. "All I had before today on any of this was suppositions and guesswork; his involvement was completely unexpected, and _he's_ the only lead I have thus far."

Lex didn't hear any sound being made as the captain looked as though he was grinding his teeth together, but it was probably a close thing.

"--What _else_ did you happen to _leave out?_ " the captain demanded lowly, under his breath.

"I have my LuthorCorp IT staff looking at the USB stick he was using to gain access to our systems," Lex told him. "We know from the previous break-ins that it's a completely automated process, miles beyond anything my people have seen before -- you just plug it in, wait, then unplug. The kid was more or less a delivery boy, using that thing," Lex told him. "And yes, my people are trained professionals; they'll follow the computer forensics standards to the letter." Which meant working off of an isolated copy, not the original, as a start.

"I want that original device, Mr. Luthor," the captain told him quietly yet heatedly.

"You'll have it," Lex told him. "The only reason I had my people look over it first was because I needed to know whether that the program had captured anything too sensitive to hand to the city police, first."

...Well, maybe not the _only_ reason, but that ought to be apparent to just about anyone with two brain cells to rub together, and if it wasn't, Lex sure as hell wasn't going to be the one to bring it up.

" _'Sensitive'_?" the captain said under his breath. "I don't give a flying monkey's ass how _'sensitive'_ you think your company's--"

"Sensitive and highly-classified information pertaining to certain government-funded LuthorCorp projects dealing with national security and the public defense," Lex cut across him tersely. "Military projects."

The police captain stopped in place. "You are explaining what my men are walking into," he was told. " **Now**."

Lex closed his eyes and remembered what his father had said earlier, and it rang in his ears and made him sick to his stomach.

_And how long do you think before that location is compromised? If it ever became public that Luthorcorp is experimenting on people with abilities--_

Lex took in a deep breath and pushed the feeling aside and down. Hard. _It won't._ Even with that location compromised now, Lex wouldn't _let_ that happen. He'd thought he’d been acting paranoid earlier, if not simply over-conservative, having them shut down the mainframe. Apparently he hadn't been.

But that didn't matter. What _did_ matter was that the military was never going to find out about the meteor freak testing. He'd kept those projects completely isolated from each other, even with them both falling under the larger umbrella of Project 33.1. No-one was going to be looking that closely into Belle Reeve; Lex would make sure of that.

The military, on the other hand, _was_ going to hear about _this_. And the military had a vested interest in keeping those joint-funded LuthorCorp projects under wraps and far quieter than any of the usual sort of top secret, need-to-know bullshit. _Those_ joint projects, a specialized subgrouping of the 33.1 work, were practically burn-before-reading. He and his people had had to sign a whole hell of a lot of binding paperwork to that effect, and anyone working on those projects had had to not only pass a background check with a pristine history, but also get black-level government security clearances prior to any involvement; the whole nine.

Bringing the police into it meant bringing it to official government notice. Breaking into these otherwise secure systems with impunity had been one thing -- and if they could crack those LuthorCorp systems using that code, they could crack just about anything the government had on hand at the moment with it too, though that was almost beside the point, now. _How_ they had done it really didn’t matter, anymore; what mattered was _what_ they had done. The fact was that these greedy, narrow-minded bastards had _attacked_ a LuthorCorp facility on U.S. soil, though, and _that_ meant that these people had just labeled themselves as _terrorists_. **Officially.**

The fact that the facility housed information sensitive to national security and the government's military only compounded the magnitude and the scope of the infraction. That meant that the state police weren't the only ones who were going to have a real problem with this; the **federal** government was going to go after them, too. And that was all _before_ the military got in on the game, because there was no way they wouldn't want a piece of these people, after this.

Yes, he'd set a trap for the thief and caught him. And then he'd set a trap for the thief's bosses ...and they'd ignored the first part of it, leaving the thief in jail to rot. But they'd tripped the second part of it all the same -- the fact that he'd brought their operations to official government notice -- and now that they'd stepped out of line so badly, he'd have the entire government -- law enforcement at every level, FBI, _and_ the military -- going after these people, _for_ him. All he’d had to do was tell the truth when they performed their next move -- which he had -- and he wouldn't even have to lift a finger himself to take them down, now. And it was all completely legal.

Just as their actions were and had been completely **il** legal.

Not to mention the fact that his previously-thought-to-be-overly-paranoid foresight had already led him to secure the most sensitive data as well as it _could_ be safeguarded, under the circumstances. That would score him more than a few points with the military, too -- that he'd been proactive enough to keep those joint-funded projects that they knew and cared about safe.

Lex fought down a smile. He loved it when a plan came together.

...Of course, that all hinged on the assumption that the terrorist assault team that had infiltrated his facility couldn't bring the mainframe back online to hack it. If they had brought in their own power source, somehow, and attempted that while the building was empty -- completely evacuated -- with nothing and no-one to stop them, they could walk away with absolutely everything. His people wouldn't even be able to tell if the terrorists were doing it; not with all the security footage down.

Lex suddenly didn't feel so much like smiling anymore.

Lex slowly let out the breath he'd taken in, drew in another one. He opened his eyes and looked at the captain of police.

"It's primarily a datacenter," he told the man. "There are some areas where hazardous materials are stored, but those are separate projects. No biological or chemical weaponry. All restricted areas are clearly marked." He took in another breath. "If you walk into advanced weaponry in there, it's not something they'll have picked up from us in there."

"All right," the captain said. "You leaving anything else out?"

"That datacenter houses one of the mainframes that is dedicated to storing the majority of that sensitive military project data," Lex told him under his breath.

"I am sensing a pattern here," the police captain told him.

Lex nodded tersely, once.

"And these people have been after this data for seven months." There was a pause. "I want your company’s incident reports on those other break-ins, Mr. Luthor."

Well, in for a penny... It wasn't like he hadn't known this part of it was coming from the moment he'd decided to go to the police.

Lex nodded.

\-----

By the time Lex arrived at the scene, the police had set up a perimeter with his security personnel. He'd just started to receive a terse-but-informative report on the devolving situation at-hand from his head of security, when the building blew up.

\-----

Clark was not happy with Oliver.

At. All.

They'd gotten out through the sewers, which none of them had been exactly thrilled about, but they'd only done it at Clark's insistence. _Green Arrow_ had wanted to go out through the police line.

Vic and A.C. had pretty much all-but-refused to take sides on the issue.

Clark wasn't exactly liking the hold or influence Oliver had over any of them, at the moment.

They'd taken turns in the single shower on the premises where they'd regrouped, at Chloe's insistence. Clark had gone in last.

He listened in on them while he did, to the tune of hearing Oliver sound angry over something not being there that 'Cyborg' couldn't find.

Clark was on his last nerve by this point. He finished up in the shower, changed, and walked out.

"Where. Is. Bart." Clark demanded, stalking towards Oliver.

"It's not like the answer's changed in the last five minutes, Clark," Oliver told him almost snidely, scrubbing at his still-damp hair before tossing the towel over his shoulders. "I still don't know."

Clark gritted his teeth.

"And it was Chloe who thought he was there, not me," Oliver ended. "Maybe you should be bringing it up with her."

Clark gritted his teeth, then forced himself to close his eyes, unclench his jaw, take a breath, and step back from the edge. "...Chloe?" he asked, far more mildly of his friend.

"Working on it," he heard from her, as she did just that on her laptop in the corner.

"Okay; thank you." Clark took another deep breath before he opened his eyes and forced himself to change topics. "What did you find on 33.1; anything?" Clark asked the group. Because he'd known the others had been doing a lot more there than helping him look for Bart. and taking out security guards left and right. ...And planting explosive charges every-freaking-where while they were at it.

"You're welcome, by the way, for saving your ass, Boy Scout," Oliver tossed out there, and Clark clenched his fists at his sides and fought hard, barely resisting the urge to hit the archer.

He finally settled on ignoring Oliver instead, which was just about the worst insult Clark could think of at the moment.

"Victor?" Clark asked, turning to him. He'd been the one to hack the security grid, so it'd make sense for him to have been the one doing the looking in cyberspace.

Vic winced.

"Clark--" Oliver began.

"I'm not asking you, Oliver," Clark said firmly, not taking his eyes off Vic.

Victor sighed and shrugged. "While I was jacked into their computers, dealing with the security system, I took a good look around ...but I ran into a dead end," he said. "I swear there had to be more systems in there that I just couldn't access. I should've been able to get in, if they were online anywhere. I think they were disconnected somehow. There were a lot of extra network shunts in there that weren't being used anywhere close to capacity, some references in some of the lookup tables to servers that didn't exist anywhere in the building as far as I could see, and the internal power grid was way too big for what I saw they had running before they yanked the building off the city grid and shut everything down. So were the backup generators," he explained. "I wish we'd been able to get them back up and running. Maybe if I'd had more time..." he shrugged again.

"So there was nothing on 33.1 there," Clark said.

"...No," said Victor. "Not that I could get at while we were there. There might've been."

"Until you blew everything up," Clark said, turning to give Oliver a a very pointed look.

"You agreed to that," Oliver said.

"Under protest," Clark said, crossing his arms, and, given that Chloe had been wrong about Bart, now he was really hoping Chloe had at least been right about everyone else having gotten out of the building before it had blew...

"We haven't processed all the data we did get yet," Oliver cut in coldly. "It takes time to--"

"How much have you guys actually found on 33.1?" Clark cut in. "Anything? Even a single file?"

Victor and A.C. exchanged a look. "Bart's come up with a lot of promising stuff," Vic put out there.

"One file," Clark repeated. "One thing that you can show me."

"It doesn't work like that, Kent," Oliver told him thinly.

"He's right," A.C. said, not sounding happy about it. "It's all whispers from word of mouth, hints leads and maybes, until we finally find a database that's got the actual files in it. Luthor's got this stuff locked down tight."

...In other words, Clark himself knew more than the rest of them did, just from one short conversation with a couple escapee freaks a little more than a year ago, even though Bart and Oliver had been working on this for at least six or seven months now, from before Oliver had picked Vic up and had him join the effort. And Clark hadn't ever told any of them about 33.1, just Chloe; he'd been surprised that Oliver had even heard of it. And so had Chloe. So that meant...

Clark ran his hands through his hair and paced away from them, thinking hard, and not liking what he was coming up with.

"There are hundreds of facilities, and we can't hit every one," Oliver told him. "Not without help."

Clark stopped in his tracks. "I am not breaking into LuthorCorp facilities for you," Clark told him flatly, turning towards him.

"You did today," Oliver said.

"I was there to help Bart!" Clark told him.

"And we bailed you out doing it," Oliver told him.

"And he wouldn't be needing me to bail him out in the first place if you hadn't been having him running around doing your dirty work _stealing_ things for you!" Clark yelled at him.

"He was fine with it," Oliver said, with an edge to his voice.

"No, he _wasn't_ ," Clark told him. "He was uncomfortable about it; he lied about it until I called him on it."

"Maybe he wanted to keep it a secret," Oliver said.

"He wasn't proud of what he was doing, Oliver," Clark told him. "He was embarrassed and ashamed. He didn't want me to find out."

"Probably because he knew you'd be an ass about it!" Oliver told him, standing up and stalking over to him. "You're so busy with your own 'things' that you can't even help out with something this important!"

"Believe it or not, my own 'things' are more important than 33.1!" Clark all but yelled at him. "Lex can wait; what I'm working on can't!"

"Oh, _well_ then," Oliver said, "Maybe I'm tring to do the wrong thing, after all. Tell me, _Kent_ ," he said in murderous tones, "What, _exactly_ , do you think is so much more important than enhanced humans with special abilities getting imprisoned and _experimented_ on that just can't wait?!"

It felt like someone digging a knife into his gut -- he _knew_ what _that_ felt like -- and Clark didn't trust Oliver farther than an inch just then. Especially not after all this. No way. He wasn't about to talk alien stuff with him, or explain any single thing he didn't have to. And _he didn't have to_.

So Clark dug in his heels, straightened to his full height, and crossed his arms.

"Nothing you can deal with," Clark told Oliver coldly.

"Oh?" Oliver said, getting up in his face and just about baring his teeth at him. " _Try me._ "

Clark narrowed his eyes and stared Oliver down. He wasn't falling for that one.

"You know, Oliver," Clark said slowly, not backing down a micrometer, let alone an inch. "You talk a pretty good game about people creating... 'superfreaks' and using them in wars. But the only person I see around here that's trying to start one? Is **you**."

Oliver glared up at him.

Clark glared right back.

"Oh, shit," said Chloe.

They both turned to face her.

"Bart's in jail," she said.

"...What?" Clark said, dropping his arms, stunned.

"Bart's in jail," she repeated, looking up. She looked as shocked as Clark felt. "The processing paperwork only went through this afternoon; that's why I didn't catch it." She looked out-and-out _worried_.

"But..." _that doesn't make any sense!_ "The facility where Bart got grabbed was inside the city limits. That's outside Smallville PD's jurisdiction." _What's he doing there?_ "What's Lex _doing?_ "

Chloe glanced over her shoulder at him, face grim. "Clark, Lex didn't take Bart to Smallville." She turned back to her laptop and started typing furiously.

"What?!" Clark frowned furiously as he walked over and leaned down to look over her shoulder.

"Lex turned him over to the Metropolis PD," she said, as she pulled up the screen and twisted her head to look up at him. She held her laptop out and tilted the screen a little bit so he could see it, and he read over what she'd pulled up quickly, then straightened.

"Aw, hell," A.C. said, as he and Vic took their turns looking at the file on-screen.

"It's a trap," was Oliver's contribution to the discussion, after he’d set down his bow and finally meandered over to look.

"They have him at the station," Clark said. How was that a trap?

"No, they don't," said Oliver. "Don't you get it? It's a fake. --Look at his picture," Oliver pointed out. "That's not a mugshot in a police lineup. And he looks asleep."

"Or passed out," Chloe said grimly.

"If they'd tried to put Bart in a standard mugshot in a police lineup, he'd have been out of there," Clark pointed out.

A.C. crossed his arms. "Like he'd even stay still long enough to get his picture taken without being drugged in the first place," he said under his breath with a tight smile. Clark saw Vic elbow him.

"Luthor has someone at the police station," Oliver said, as if it closed the matter. "They put in a fake file for him."

"Why?"

"Who knows?" Oliver said. "Maybe he wants us to storm the place, get in a shooting war with the police. They sure showed up quickly to the Ridge Facility, didn't they?"

Clark shot him a look. "You're the one who wanted to go through their lineup before."

"Over, Kent, not through. _Over_ ," Olier corrected him.

Clark frowned at him, then glanced back down to Chloe. He leaned over Chloe's shoulder again as she brought up more information from the station's computers, not that there was much to be had in their systems yet.

"Oh, come on. Think about it," Oliver added. "Lex Luthor working with the police? When _he's_ the one using people as human lab rats?" Oliver laughed and shook his head. "No way. He couldn't risk it. Besides, Luthor wouldn't turn him over to anyone! There's no way he'd just let Bart go!"

 _Not after this..._ was the echo Clark heard, and he grimaced and straightened up again. He hadn't thought Lex would turn Bart over to the police after catching him, yeah... but not for the same reasons Oliver seemed to think.

"And you think he would have if you hadn't just blown up his facility?" Clark put out there, mostly just to see what Oliver would say.

"No," Oliver said bluntly. "He couldn't afford to. He can't. He's getting desperate. We're _finally_ beginning to hit him where it hurts. --We're getting close, I know it!" And Oliver sounded bloodily happy about that.

Clark crossed his arms. "And Bart's in jail now." _Because of you._ Which is what Clark had been afraid of when he'd first started trying to talk Bart out of this.

"No, Lex wants us to _think_ Bart's in jail," Oliver waved off. "There's a difference."

"So then where is he?" Clark pushed.

"If he's not there..." Vic sat down at his own terminal and started typing. "...Then he has to be in one of the other nearby facilities," Vic said, finishing his search and turning back to them. "They wouldn't be able to move him that quickly, that far, without us noticing. He's probably still in the city; he can't be outside the state."

Oliver nodded. "I think Chloe was onto something with the Ridge Facility, with the test equipment they just brought in. They'd had him for more than twelve hours before we hit them this afternoon. They probably held him there for at least some of that time."

"You think they moved him again right before we caught up to them?" A.C. asked.

"It makes sense," Vic said slowly. "The computer systems I could read were almost bare, like they'd just been wiped."

"Right," Oliver said. "Now, why else would they do that, unless they had a reason to know that we'd be coming?"

"I still think we should check out the police station first," Clark said stiffly.

"Fine, you do that," Oliver said. "We'll check up on other leads."

"Oliver," Clark said, stepping in front of him. "I'm serious. What are you going to do if Lex actually turned him over to the authorities?"

"He didn't," Oliver said, sounding almost bemused.

"Oliver--"

"Do you really think the police can hold him?" Oliver said, sounding almost surprised, like he thought Clark was being stupid.

Clark centered his balance. "Humor me for a second," Clark said. "What if he did. What if Lex really did turn Bart over to the police, and what if he made sure that the police can hold him there?"

Oliver eyed him sideways. "That's a lot of 'what if's."

"Oliver, if he caught him, he can probably hold him," Chloe said. "This is Lex we're talking about."

Clark crossed his arms. "Just answer the question," Clark said.

Oliver sighed. "What do you think I'd do, Clark?" Oliver answered flippantly, walking around him. "I'd get him out of there."

Clark grabbed his arm, forcing him to stop. "Which you, Oliver? Green Arrow? Or Oliver Queen of Queen Industries?"

Oliver pulled his arm free. "Clark--"

"Because it's not the same thing," Clark said adamantly. "If Green Arrow breaks him out, Bart will be running from the cops for the rest of his life."

Oliver snorted. "He spends his whole life running anyway," he said with a tilted smile, making it into a half-serious joke, but Clark didn't find it funny in the least.

He grabbed his coat up instead. "I'm heading over to the police station," he told them.

"Fine," Oliver waves him off, as he moved over to the computer consoles where Victor and A.C. were already working. "We'll be here, actually trying to find him."

Clark gritted his teeth, sharing a glance with Chloe. "And if I do find him over there?" he asked Oliver.

"Then we'll have your friend Chloe here write up transfer orders for him inside their system and we'll hit the van en-route," Oliver said. "It'll be easier to grab him, and less people will get hurt. ...Hell, probably only Luthor's people will get hurt. I can't see him letting the police handle the escort."

Clark shared another quick glance with Chloe. He turned away for the door, and she stayed with the rest of the group. She had the right idea; it would be better if she stayed and helped them search, just in case the police report was bogus.

"Oh, and don't worry, Boy Scout," Oliver called after him. "If it's another trap, we'll just bail you out again."

Clark clenched his jaw as he slammed the door shut behind him.

"All right," he heard Oliver start to say, listening through the door with super-hearing. "I figure that what we should do is to keep the pressure up on Luthor. We'll narrow down the list of possibilities to ten locations, then hit them each fast and hard, in order, until we find Bart..."

Clark put on his coat and sped away, over and out and up onto the top of another building, several blocks away. He jumped from building to building, until he made it to the police station in question.

It didn't take long for him to crouch down on an adjacent rooftop, settle in, and start scanning the building with X-ray vision, top to bottom.

Bart was there, in a holding cell. So was Lex -- Clark actually found him first, in another room in the main part of the station. It didn't look like an interrogation room, either. There were one or two other people with him who looked like LuthorCorp employees...

...and the rest of the room, along with the rest of the station, was filled with cops.

Clark grimaced, and took a moment to shove his hand into his coat pocket and pull out the earpiece he'd been given, back at the Ridge Facility. He lifted it up, ready to call in and get started on getting the 'I told you so's' out of the way so that they could get around to actually getting Bart out and free sometime that century.

But then Clark hesitated. He frowned as he realized that he really didn't _want_ to call Oliver in on this. And that had him stopping for a moment, to think about why he felt that way.

He looked down at the earpiece as it sat in the palm of his hand, and he thought about how blaise Oliver had been about breaking Bart out. How Oliver hadn't cared in the least that Bart was now going to have a criminal record.

...And why would he? Oliver was rich. He had lawyers; practically an army of them at his beck and call. And if anybody ever found out that he was the Green Arrow, he could use those lawyers to keep himself out of jail, and buy himself off. Buy himself out of all that property damage, all the lawsuits, everything. Because that was what rich people did when they got caught.

And why _would_ Oliver use them for anybody else? He wasn't the one who had gotten caught. That right there was probably the reason why he wasn't funding them as Queen Industries employees directly. As long as _he_ didn't get caught, there was no connection back to him, and he didn't and _wouldn't_ have to bring Queen Industries resources into it.

Clark gritted his teeth and glared down at the earpiece. He remembered that first time they'd met, when he'd caught Oliver as Green Arrow out on that rooftop, and how he'd planned on turning Oliver in, for scaring his mother like that. For stealing that borrowed necklace right off of her, when she'd had no idea that what Lionel had given to her for the night had been stolen property, about any of it.

How he hadn't ended up turning Oliver in after all, because he'd been stupid and gotten himself caught out by Oliver. How Oliver had found out he had powers. How it had left him in a standoff with him, one he really, really hadn't liked; still didn't.

But time had passed, and Oliver hadn't called him out, hadn't outed him to anyone. Hadn't really asked for anything; it had mostly been tit-for-tat. He'd even seemed to clean up his Green Arrow act a bit. Clark had actually started to trust Oliver, actually started to think that maybe he wasn't so bad ...until _this_.

He'd had a bad feeling about everything even before the Ridge Facility, but he'd shoved it aside because helping Bart had taken precedence. Things hadn't exactly gotten better at the facility, or after, and _now_...

If Oliver got Bart out, Bart would owe him. Whether Bart was in the free and clear or not, Bart would owe him, because Bart couldn't get out himself.

And Oliver would never let him forget it. Not if the way Oliver was treating Clark was any indication, and Clark had only been locked in a storeroom by a couple of clueless guards, not out-and-out caught and ID'ed by the police.

Oliver wasn't planning on, or even interested in, trying to clear Bart's name, either. And _that_ meant that once Bart was out, Bart would be even more dependent on Oliver than he was now. Oliver could protect Bart... but Clark wasn't about to bet the farm that Oliver would continue to do that if Bart stopped being useful to him. Or wanted out of Oliver's group.

The thing was, though -- that Clark knew but that Oliver somehow didn't really seem to get -- was that there were consequences to not just what they did, but how they did it. And whether Oliver realized it or not -- and Clark would bet the farm on ‘not’ -- he was walking on a high-wire daily, because Oliver was counting on the fact -- really, depending on the _hope_ \-- that nobody would tell on him.

Oliver was counting on the 'fact' that he wouldn't have to use all of his resources and things for anyone. That they'd all think that ending up more and more dependent on him and in debt to him for his help -- at getting them out of situations he'd gotten them into in the first place -- was okay. That instead of any one of them cutting a deal with the police or whoever caught them, that every single one of them would wait for him to spring them instead, because they thought -- and would continue to think -- it would be the 'better deal'.

That none of them would get sick and tired of always having to run and hide -- or get too disgusted by, or frightened and uncomfortable with, what was going on -- and that no-one would just wake up one day and decide to walk into a police station somewhere and give themselves -- and Oliver -- up.

Worse, Oliver wasn’t a meteor freak. He didn’t have powers at all. And because of that, he didn’t follow the unwritten rules that went along with that. Worse, he didn’t think of the rest of them as equals. It had worked out okay for him with Vic and Bart and A.C. so far, sure, but that was probably because they were ‘enhanced humans with special abilities’, not meteor freaks.

They were used to thinking of rich guys as better than them, with more power. Clark knew otherwise, from growing up in Smallville. Frankly, Oliver was _lucky_ that he hadn’t run across anybody in Lex’s Level 33.1 project yet, because not only would the meteor freaks **not** trust him, they’d kick his ass for thinking and acting like he was better and more powerful and capable than they were. Heck, he wouldn’t even have to do _anything_ really; the way he was, they’d practically be able to smell it on him. He wasn’t trustworthy in a way that would mean squat to any meteor freak with half an existing survival instinct, if he was even trustworthy in any way that mattered at all to begin with.

And with most of the meteor freaks being insane, if Oliver did find them and attempt to spring them, he’d really be lucky just to get out of there alive, “saving” them from Lex or not. And what would he do, anyway, just let them escape to run off and hurt people again? The alternative was attempting to ‘take them in’ like he’d done with Vic and A.C. and Bart. Except that wouldn’t work; not with the ‘freaks. Because at the first sign of anything that might cause them to think Oliver was trying to exploit them -- and, looking at what had happened with Bart, he _would_ try -- they’d write Oliver off as being worse than Lex and immediately go for the throat. Clark wouldn’t blame them for it, even. Meteor freak stuff wasn’t tit-for-tat, it was ‘keep your mouth shut because it’s nobody’s business but our own’.

That was honestly what had Clark freaked out the most about everything that had happened… and everything he didn’t know about yet. Like it or not, lack of any real powers or not, Lex **was** a meteor freak, and he played by meteor freak rules. Clark knew first-hand how much Lex tended to avoid bringing the police into ‘freak things, especially when it came to burglaries -- first with the meteor rock tattoos, and more recently with the painting-map Bart had stolen way back when, that had pointed the way to one of the three stones of power.

Oliver had more or less had blackmailed Clark into silence for what he’d done, just to stay out of jail. If Clark told, Oliver would tell. That wasn’t how it worked with the freaks; if you got caught and stopped, you went quietly to Belle Reeve, if you went at all, and everybody involved kept the how and why of it to themselves. Oliver didn’t play by meteor freak rules; Lex did.

...But not this time. _This_ time when Lex had caught up to Bart, he’d turned the speedster over to the police -- and not even the Smallville police who knew about superpowered individuals, either. This was serious. And Clark couldn’t think of a reason why Lex would do that. ...Not with what little he knew. It made him wonder, with a growing sickening feeling in his gut, exactly what else was going on that he _didn’t_ know about. What had Bart gotten himself into?

Maybe the problem was that Lex didn’t count Bart as a meteor freak -- but the fact that Bart had still been out on the streets for Oliver to run into in the first place, that Lex hadn’t sent his people after him for _that_ , said a lot. Lex hadn’t even put out an APB on somebody he’d thought was a regular thief; he’d just tried to track them and the painting down himself, and then let it go when things went too far south. If he didn’t go after someone he’d thought was a regular person, why would he go after someone who had powers but wasn’t a meteor freak? It wasn’t like Bart was psychotic and needed to be locked up. So what had changed? What was different?

 _What_ in god’s name had Bart gotten himself into that Clark didn’t know about yet? ...And what had he and Chloe gotten themselves into the middle of between Green Arrow and Lex Luthor in trying to get Bart out of it?

Clark shook himself. First things first, he needed to get Bart out of jail before dealing with any of the rest of it. And Clark wanted more than just ‘Bart out of there’ -- he wanted Bart out and free with his _name cleared_ , but he couldn't do that alone. Oliver wasn't even considering trying to clear Bart's name; he was only going to free him.

And if that was really some kind of shock collar around Bart’s neck, or some kind of explosive device, then the police weren't playing by the normal human rulebook. If they were okay with doing that, they probably weren't planning on letting him go anytime soon, if ever. So if the police weren't interested in letting Bart go, legally, and Oliver wasn't interested in helping Bart legally, then the only option for Bart left anymore was either going to jail or being free and on the run, and...

...well, Clark didn't need Oliver's help for _that_. He could handle that himself.

_No strings attached._

Clark crushed the earpiece in his hand to dust, then wiped it away.

They had all been right earlier about one thing, though: he shouldn't have gone in without a plan.

So _this_ time Clark leaned forward and scanned the building carefully, first.

When he was done, he pulled out his cellphone. He flipped it open, then paused for a moment again to think, and decided against calling Chloe for help in figuring things out. She was still with Oliver and the others, and while what Oliver had said about hitting ten more LuthorCorp facilities _really soon_ didn't sound good, he didn't want Oliver or the others clued in to what _he_ was doing until it was too late for any of them to do anything about it, either. Having Oliver crash the police station as the Green Arrow would just make things that much worse.

It'd probably be better if he didn't bring Chloe into this part of things, anyway -- especially if anything went wrong. Plausible deniability and a solid alibi, at the worst; Vic and A.C. would vouch for her, if nothing else.

So, instead, Clark typed a text to himself, then hit send. If things went badly this time, Chloe would find his phone at back at the farm, where he’d be leaving it, and she’d check it first for clues before anything else.

Clark shoved his cellphone back into his coat pocket and raced home, thinking hard all the while about what he should, and needed to, do.

\-----

Lex was tired, sore, and still aching a bit from the explosion, which had knocked him, along with most of the front line, off of their feet when the facility had gone up. He had a headache from the bickering and arguing that had been going on around him all afternoon and into the evening, and he was more than a little pissed off that he was having to field the same sets of questions with the exact same answers, since he didn't know any more then than he did now, or vice-versa.

It wasn't that he was being interrogated, or even under suspicion, and somehow that made it even worse.

Lex was getting up and about to query out loud if maybe they should just call it a night until their forensics people actually had _something_ more to work with to make their efforts in some way worthwhile, when there was an almighty **CRASH!** and the floor actually vibrated for a moment.

Lex found himself in a race for the front of the police station with the captain, and a good half of the officers on duty. The majority of the rest that he could see were hunkered down with weapons at the windows.

They both burst out onto the front steps and skid to a halt.

It was about that point that the police captain turned to him and did a double-take.

"What the hell are you doing out here?!" the police captain demanded, as more policemen rushed out and around them to take up positions on the steps.

Lex stared at him. "There was that loud noise and--"

The police captain shoved himself forward through the crowd of armed officers, pushing Lex behind him and back towards the doors again at the same time.

"You are a _civilian!_ " Lex was informed, as policemen all around them dropped into lines of standing and kneeling positions. "You are supposed to run _away_ from the loud noises!" the captain complained as he roughly shoved Lex back towards the station doors again, while Lex was busy trying to get a good look around. All the while, there was shouting and hurried motion all about them as uniformed and plainclothes officers alike continued to stream out of the building and take up target positions. Weapons were pointed outward to cover the area in every direction as other police force members spilled out of the doorway, wearing varying amounts of armored apparel, and also proceeded to pull out and add to the mix all manner of handguns, rifles, semiautomatics... was that a _grenade launcher?_

Lex pushed back a bit, and finally visually located what must have been the source of the noise: there was a smashed-up looking garbage dumpster, sitting upside-down in the middle of the cleared sidewalk area at the corner of the street, right in front of the station.

"It-- it came out of the sky!" he heard one of the on-duty officers babble almost incoherently, from halfway down the stairs.

"I saw it," he heard another man say grimly, like he was making a report. "Came out of nowhere, dropped at least five stories, straight down."

 _I guess that **would** make an unholy racket,_ Lex had to admit.

Everyone was tense -- even Lex, who had no idea what in the hell was going on, except that these cops seemed to consider it an attack -- and the tension strung out as seconds passed and people held their breaths and... nothing else seemed to happen.

He scanned the area -- full of tense cops, and one out-of-place dumpster.

He glanced behind him and realized that between everybody outside the front of the building, at and on the steps, and at the windows, they had at least a good three-quarters of the station out here.

Almost no-one was inside, and every last one of them was looking out the front and...

"...distracted," Lex murmured.

And that was when he realized what was going on.

Lex wheeled, cursing under his breath, and started shoving himself through the throng of officers back towards the doors.

"Luthor, what--?" the captain said, as he got jostled by someone accidentally shoved into his back.

"Distraction. It's a _distraction!_ " Lex shouted out, grabbing onto the edge and shoving himself between the doors. "They're not _here_ , they're _in the back!_ Get to the--!!"

Lex stumbled, finally getting past the near-solid mass of officers, and caught himself on the edge of a desk.

He spat out another curse.

The inside of the station was a mess. Throughout the entire back of the room, papers were strewn about, everywhere, all over the desks and across the floor, like a huge wind had blown through the back of the station.

...or a person who could move fast enough to generate their own wind in the wake of their passage.

And as he watched, an officer staggered out of the back area, from the corridor that led to the cell block. The captain's "guy" who was in charge of watching the detainees.

"What--" the officer said, looking around the room, dazed and confused.

"You left your post?" Lex said, jogging towards him, and when the man shook his head abruptly, Lex had his second realization and came to a screeching halt. "--You're just coming off of your shift," Lex breathed out in shock, suddenly realizing why there had suddenly seemed to be so many more people about. _Holy shit._

"I, yes," the poor man stammered. "But--"

"You need help for your second-shift replacement; they came in the back and rushed you both as you were coming out," Lex finished for him, as the captain caught up with them both.

"Yes-- well _no_ ," the officer said, "I mean--"

"How badly were you both injured?" the police captain asked grimly, coming over.

The man straightened and seemed to get his bearings back as his captain caught his eye. "Sir, we're both fine, we weren't attacked, exactly, but the teenager they brought in--"

Lex sprinted for the cell block. He had to know.

He was too late, and he knew it, but he was focused, and he caught glimpses of things as he passed.

By the time he’d reached the empty cell, he was dead-certain.

Bart Allen hadn't broken out. The dumpster falling hadn't been a signal for him to run.

No, that wasn't it at all. _Someone else had broken in._

"This was planned," Lex said dully, as the police captain walked up to him. It was obvious from everything Lex had seen. For a start, the cell door had _not_ been ripped open. A set of keys was hanging out of it, likely from one of the two officers' belts. "They hit at shift change, caused a distraction; they took out the cameras," Lex said grimly, waving a hand at them.

The two super high-speed cameras that he'd had his own people set up to watch the speedster in his cell, that interfaced with the shock collar, were lying smashed on the floor. One of the cameras had been obvious. The other had been mounted in a shadowy corner in an empty cell on the opposite side of the block, two cells down from where the speedster had been held. That camera had been smashed up, too, the cell door also hanging open freely, when it had been shut.

Lex took in a deep breath and let it out again. He looked around for the conventional cameras, expecting no different. The other ones that had to be there, or Lex and his remote wouldn’t have been seen by the other officer on duty to inform the captain of what he’d been about to do, when he'd been in there before.

The nominal CCD cameras at each end of the long corridor in the holding cell area were decidedly _not_ missing from their mounts. Nor were they lying smashed on the floor, like their high-end LuthorCorp-supplied counterparts. Instead, they had had their lenses covered over with an odd, white fabric material to blind them.

"All of the cameras," Lex added, but he frowned as he walked up to the one farthest from the doorway, and closest to the now-vacant cell. It was whole under the cloth, as far as Lex could determine, but... didn't one usually cover this sort of thing over with a black bag, not a white one? And wasn’t said bag generally large enough to be easily tossed over such a camera to keep the perpetrator from being seen while the covering-up was occurring out of the field of view? And... Wait, it wasn't a small white bag.

Lex drew a little closer to it and his eyes narrowed. What _was_ that...?

Lex blinked as he finally recognized it. Not a bag at all. No, the camera -- and most of the mount -- had been covered with...

With...

Lex stared.

Blankly, he turned away from the first covered camera-and-mount and walked to the other end of the corridor, over to the doors that were the only entrance and exit to the jail cells here. He tilted his head back and looked up above the opening entryway. He stared up at the camera that was there, covered with the same sort of thing that had been put over the other camera, too.

He fought the urge to pull the fabric off and turn it over and over in his hands, because it was so... surreal. So _bizarre_.

Because _why_ would _anyone_ use...?

Lex shook his head abruptly, like he was trying to shake off water, then dropped his head and numbly walked out of the detainment area. He barely paused to take better note of the state of the doors as he walked by them.

The first door to the cell block had nearly been embedded in the wall, Lex had seen as he'd passed it, and the second had also obviously been forced open faster than it should have moved.

Other than that, the way in to the cell block was...

"--No, look, I'm telling you, I literally didn't see anybody _there_ ," the officer who'd been watching the cellblock tried to explain to his buddies, sounding exasperated now. "One second, I'm opening the doors to let Carlos take my station, and the next-- they're open. That's it. It's not that I didn't see enough to make an ID; it's because nobody _rushed_ the place. When I say I didn't see anything, I mean I really didn't see **anything!** " he explained in frustration, to Lex's growing amazement.

"Think it was him?" Lex heard, and he had to sit down in a nearby chair. Hard.

And then he dropped his head down onto the desk next to it and started to laugh. Hysterically.

He had to stop when the police captain of the station walked up to him and stood there, next to him. Likely waiting for an explanation to what must have looked like a nervous breakdown to anyone halfway sane.

"I, I'm sorry," Lex finally gasped out, shoulders still shaking. "I just-- it's not funny," he admitted freely, "I know that, I know that it isn't, it's just-- socks," he said, waving his hands about, at a loss, as the man frowned down at him. "Just... _socks_ ," Lex said, desperately trying not to lose it again, because whoever had come in and run to Bart Allen's rescue had covered the cameras with _socks_ , and who did that, even?

Actually, Lex had a pretty good idea who, if what the police who were milling about them were saying about this Urban Legend now in the background was anything to go by.

Because there _was_ someone who Lex knew who was strong enough to wrench solid steel metal apart, when it was attached to a car... and likely throw it, or something like it, a decent distance just as easily.

Someone who was able to show up and vanish into thin air, and you'd never see how he came or went... unless maybe there was a lot of paper around to mark their passage.

Someone who could be hit by a car... or bullets... and come out of it without a scratch. ...Well, _sometimes_ anyway.

Someone who had been just as interested in that painting that Bart Allen had ended up stealing as Lex himself was... and just might possibly have run into the kid at the time and rescued him from those criminals back then, to again and still want to rescue him from the police _now_.

Someone who had been running wild in Metropolis that one summer, while Lex had been stranded on that uninhabited island.

Someone who was tall enough to be able to reach a camera mounted that high up so easily... and who was crazy enough to think that stuffing a clean _gym sock_ over it -- to carefully cover it completely and thoroughly, mind you, all the way up to the _ceiling_ \-- was a perfectly serviceable idea.

The only problem was...

"I don't think this was your Urban Legend," Lex had to say, rubbing the back of his hand against his forehead, before dropping it. Because, from their own descriptions and re-telling of tales... "He just didn't do enough damage."

"I have a dumpster out front that says otherwise," one of the higher-ranking detectives huffed out at him.

Lex just shook his head and let out a long, quiet breath. He finally let himself untense his shoulders somewhat. It was easy enough to do now: he didn't feel like laughing anymore.

"They came at shift change," Lex said, ticking his points off. "The dumpster dropped, but nobody was hurt. Nobody was even close to it, when and where it fell," he pointed out. "The doors to the cells were forced, but not broken, _because_ they struck at shift change, when they were letting someone through. I doubt the doors are even damaged all that much, if they were damaged at all. The normal police cameras were left alone, except for being covered," _though the high-speed LuthorCorp ones weren't_ , but that might've been pure spite, or just not enough time to handle them. "Keys were used on the cell doors, and--"

"--Sir, the evidence locker was hit, too," one of the uniformed set reported grimly, walking up from behind them. "Nothing for the LuthorCorp case is left, and the tapes from the station cameras for the last half-hour are gone. They cleared everything out that we had on them."

"...The feeds from our cameras?" Lex asked his assistant wearily, as she walked up to his side. Because there was a chance that they might've gotten something, after all, since they'd been sending a wireless signal to a different and completely separate storage-and-processing device, one meant to handle the automatic signaling to the shock collar on the speedster. But she shook her head.

"It’s been smashed. It’s lying out on the floor next to the briefcase it was in," she told him, gesturing back at the 'war room' they'd been working from in the hours prior to this last and latest mess, and he sighed.

"Too much foresight and forethought, too much inside knowledge, and far too thorough a job," Lex said. Their so-called Urban Legend was known for spur-of-the-moment, extremely violent episodes with a lot of property damage attached, and this was none of those three. And then Lex had to wince, because…

"I doubt this was even the same group that hit the Ridge Facility, either," Lex said grimly. _For one thing, there weren’t enough explosions to go with it._ “"What happened here wasn't some reckless, spur-of-the-moment adrenaline-fest, like what happened at the Ridge Facility. No-one was attacked here, just startled; no-one even got hurt.” Were there two groups, then? ...Possibly working together? That wasn't a pleasant thought; not in the least. Green Arrow on his own was bad enough. One thing was for certain, though. “This was a planned--"

"-- _Disaster_ ," the police chief cut in angrily.

"Yes," Lex said miserably. "--How the hell did they even know Allen was here?" he added angrily after a moment, as it occurred to him to ask, and the thought left him reeling.

He frowned when one of the uniformed spoke up and said, "They must have hacked us or something."

"You only started the paperwork on him an hour ago. He wasn't even in the system yet!" Lex protested.

The police captain stared at him, and Lex had no idea why.

That was, until he was informed, slowly, "The paperwork is in the computer system. We print out hardcopies afterwards."

Lex stared at the man.

He took in a breath, thinning his lips, and said, "What."

Because, damn it all, had he not just gotten done telling the man -- and his fellow boys in blue who'd been questioning him -- that he'd had LuthorCorp systems, _secure_ systems, ones that had had to meet and exceed _national security_ standards for _top secret material_ , hacked like they were _nothing_ by these people Allen had aligned himself with? Had it not even been a few minutes past his last reiteration to them on this very salient point, _at depth?!_

And, what, did they somehow think that their police systems could stand up to even a fraction of that much abuse? He knew people who'd been able to hack police databases when they were still attending their rural backwoods _public high school_ , for god's sake!

Things went downhill from there.

\-----

Later, the following morning, when he finally was able to leave the station after dealing with the latest fallout from the speedster’s breakout-cum-escape, and something close to a formal reprimand from the police captain for dropping all of this in their lap in the first place -- as if any of them had had much of a choice in the matter -- Lex found himself accosted in his office in LuthorCorp Towers by Lionel Luthor. Which, frankly, he really could have done without just then.

Oh, and apparently his father was _gloating_ at him, of all things, for some odd reason.

"Bart Allen -- gone. He escaped,” Lionel told him, as if he didn’t already know this. “A multi-million-dollar installation destroyed. 33.1 irrevocably compromised.” Lex barely held his tongue as Lionel finished his litany off with: “But at least you found out, son, the jolly green archer and his extraordinary cohorts -- they're not your run-of-the-mill adversaries."

Lex tried not to grit his teeth too badly at the harangue, or the implications thereof. Because great. Great. It was _just great_. --Even his father got his security briefings before he did!

Yes, Lex had been stuck at the police station overnight, and his people had been locking down their information like they should have, so he’d known he’d have to wait until he was back for such information. He was frankly thrilled that they’d done such a good job of it, after he'd sent his people the right signal for the crackdown while he was still at the station. He’d even considered it prudent at the time, given that the place apparently leaked information like a sieve.

So he'd waited, and managed to hold onto his patience to wait, and only just gotten a final, uncensored, and complete debriefing from his own security staff on the matter once he'd finally arrived back in the LuthorCorp building proper. _But._ He'd just gotten out of that meeting. And Lionel hadn't been in the room during any part of it. Which meant…

\--Couldn't his people wait to inform his father _after_ himself? It wasn't like Lionel seemed to be doing anything productive with the information!

God, Lex just wanted to clean up his office and then go collapse in bed for a few hours to get himself some much-needed sleep, _without_ having to deal with his father on top of everything else. Was that really too much to ask?

...Apparently so, because Lionel was still standing there, very much not a hallucination of his overly-tired mind. And he was also just-as-obviously waiting for a response.

No, no reprieve for Lex Luthor here -- instead he got to have yet another verbal fistfight with his father, this time about having 'not run-of-the-mill adversaries'. Like he didn't already know that; it wasn't like he wasn't already planning on taking on killer aliens, once he finally got 33.1 off the ground, properly. And now Green Arrow was muddying the waters further with his own criminal pursuits.

"Which is exactly why we have to continue with 33.1. If terrorists like Green Arrow are recruiting people with abilities, the only way to protect freedom and democracy is to fight fire with fire."

Lionel snorted. "Freedom and democracy? Well, I hadn't realized your goals were quite so lofty."

 _Why did he say that as if that were some great joke?_ Why the hell did he think Lex was working with the military so closely, then? Plausible deniability?

"Well, there's a lot that escapes your attention in your declining years, Dad, but not mine," Lex shot back, and then he made a mistake. (He blamed it on the sleep deprivation afterwards.) "The security footage from the Ridge Facility was destroyed. However, several guards describe one of Green Arrow's men as someone that sounded remarkably like Clark Kent."

And even as Clark’s name was leaving Lex’s mouth, he was already mentally kicking himself over tying Martha’s son to any of it out loud -- let alone to Lionel himself!

"Clark? Impossible," Lionel told him, scoffing.

That brought Lex up short. He found himself looking at his father askance, because _that_ hadn't been the reaction he'd expected _at all_.

"...A word that always seems to pop up when talking about him, doesn't it?" Lex probed, trying to sound casual about it, because _what in the hell...?_

"Lex, it was not Clark," he was told.

Right. Because people who could move faster than any conventional camera could pick up on film were so thick on the ground these days. All of two of them on the planet that _might_ be capable of matching alien speeds, as far as Lex was aware of now. And yet…

"How can you be so sure?" Lex couldn’t help but to ask him. After all, Lionel's denial was a bit... direct. And he'd been adamant about it. As though he had proof of it, somehow. And how would that even be possible?

"Because I was having dinner with him last night when all this happened," his father informed him. "Martha made pot roast with new potatoes and tiny little baby carrots. It was delicious. Clark... Clark had three helpings."

Lex stared at his father as the implications of that started to filter in.

As he tried to make sense of this, his overly-tired and -taxed brain mentally reeling from the effort, Lionel just stood there and had the audacity to smile at him and say, "Don't worry, son. You still have plenty of enemies out there plotting your downfall." And then Lionel followed that up by clapping a hand to his shoulder, as though what he was saying was _reassuring_ somehow.

Setting aside the insanity of Lionel apparently being welcome at the Kent family home, and instead focusing on what he'd actually said about Clark, though…

...what Lionel had said didn't make a lick of sense. Because what kind of alibi was that for a speedster? All Clark would need would be a few minutes away from the table, supposedly visiting the restroom or some such, and he could have easily--

It then occurred to Lex that Lionel hadn't linked Clark to the blur in the picture from the other facility, as Lex had belatedly worried he might do. That link had only been apparent in Lex's mind, knowing what he knew.

Then it further occurred to Lex, sleep-deprived as he was, that the reason Lionel hadn’t jumped to that conclusion -- that Clark could have sped over to the Ridge Facility in time to get caught up in the thick of things -- was because…

Well, actually, Lex wasn’t sure why he wasn’t. Lionel knew that Bart Allen was the most likely culprit as a speedster for the earlier break-ins. It was who Lex had caught in his electric-shock trap, after all, and it was what he'd told the police. It was even true, as far as Lex knew.

However, for whatever reason, Lionel hadn't made the connection between Lex's mention of Clark working with Green Arrow's gang and the breakout of one of Green Arrow's cohorts at the police station, which had required a second speedster outside of Bart Allen's cell to do the dirty deed.

 _...Probably because Lionel didn't know all the details of the jailbreak, yet,_ Lex suddenly realized. Lionel just knew that the jailbreak had happened, not _how_. ...Hell, he might not even know _where_ the breakout had happened. It wasn't like Lex had told him, and he hadn’t been at the full briefing; Lex had no idea who Lionel had been talking to, or how much he’d actually heard.

Christ, it was entirely possible that Lionel might even mistakenly think that Bart’s breakout-and-release had happened at the Ridge Facility, rather than at the police station. It wasn't as though taking him there hadn't been Lex’s original plan, as given, rather than handing him over to the authorities. After all, he couldn't very well have experimented on the speedster in a jail cell at a police station, now could he?

And it wasn't as though Lex had hinted at Clark having extraordinary powers to Lionel, just that he thought Clark had _been_ there. At the Ridge Facility.

Lex hadn’t said anything about thinking that Clark had been at the jail afterwards, too, using speed powers of his own to break the younger speedster out.

...All right. That was enough. Too much. He was far too tired to be trying to deal with his father anymore. He was calling it a day.

Lex walked out of his LuthorCorp office with Lionel, and kept his mouth firmly shut as he did so. He was going home and getting some sleep, before he made a further mess of things, all on his own.

\-----

Lex wasn't sure why he was standing on the Kent’s front porch, staring into the farmhouse. He wasn’t even sure why he’d knocked on the door in the first place. He'd been on his way home. Back to the mansion, and his own bed, for some good, solid sleep that afternoon. Something that would, while getting him back into some semblance of working order after his impromptu all-nighter the night before, still completely mess up his nominal sleep schedule, have him up at all hours of the night after he woke up again, and likely leave him still cranky and out of sorts by the time Lana arrived back in Smallville from her Paris trip for a wedding gown.

Instead of going home and getting some rest like he should have done despite the downsides, though, he'd swung by the Kent farm household first.

But, with that doorway having been opened up in front of him...

 _It had seemed like a good idea at the time?_ he thought, as he stared at the speedster in front of him. _Down_ at the speedster in front of him.

Literally. It was the younger, shorter one he was staring at. Bart Allen, in the flesh.

Bart Allen stared right back.

"--don't--" Lex heard, and looked up to see Clark jogging towards them, then come to a halt midway down the hallway. "...Great," he heard Clark mutter, through the hand he rubbed across his face.

Lex glared at him.

He thought through all the things he could say to Clark in less than a second.

He took in a deep breath...

Clark winced preemptively.

...and Lex grated out his demand: " _What did you have for dinner last night?!_ "

Clark started to say something -- probably some form of denial, what else was new -- then stopped and stared at him.

Lex waited impatiently for Clark's answer, while Bart edged a bit to the side, ever so slightly out of the line of fire.

“You stay put,” Lex stated, looking to the side at the teen and putting some force behind it.

The younger speedster froze in place for a second, then got a rebellious look.

“Make me,” he said, belligerently. And that was about it.

Lex rolled his eyes and proceeded to ignore the teen; either he’d do something or he wouldn’t, and it wasn’t as though Lex himself could physically stop the speedster at the moment. So he turned back to Clark and crossed his arms and said, “ _...Well?_ ”

Clark gave him a long look. “...Why do you want to know?” he asked slowly.

Lex narrowed his eyes at him. “Just answer the question.”

Clark frowned right back at him.

“Oh. My god.” The speedster beside them threw up his hands. “Seriously? _That’s_ what you want to know?!”

“Yes,” Lex said, eyeing him.

“Bart--” Clark began.

“What, he’s pissed because he didn’t get an engraved invitation to dinner last night?” Bart must’ve noticed the wince Lex tried to suppress, because the young thief grinned at him nastily. “We had hotdogs and chicken and sausages and mashed potatoes and gravy, and lots and lots of green beans,” the teen told him like he was bragging. “And there aren’t any leftovers!”

Clark pulled a bit of a face.

“Any carrots?” Lex asked coolly, watching Clark sidelong.

“Ugh! No!” Bart proclaimed.

“Wonderful,” said Lex. “I wasn’t asking you what _you_ ate, though; I was asking _Clark_.”

“...Salad, mostly,” Clark said after a beat. He looked a bit uncomfortable.

“Wait, we had salad?” Bart said, coming up short.

Clark looked a little annoyed, or maybe just a bit exacerbated. Lex realized why after he said, “No, _I_ had salad. _You_ had everything else.”

“I, uh-- what?” Bart said, then, “...oh. Um.” And now he looked contrite ...at Clark, anyway.

Lex had to wrench his mind away from the impossibility of speedster metabolisms and back on track. He needed to know exactly what he was dealing with here, after all. “And who, exactly, did ‘we’ entail?” he queried oh-so-innocently.

Clark got it first, and he just about panicked. “--Mom was out last night!” he said quickly. “It was just us!” And then he cut himself off, seeing Lex’s response to that.

Because Lex had begun to smirk, with a great deal of bloody satisfaction. He couldn’t help it; Clark had just completely dismantled his own alibi. And now...

 _Got you,_ thought Lex.

~*~*~*~*~*~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: Y'know, I was reminded after reading the transcript that went with the episode in question here (Justice) that another DC-mandate might be 'Lex always tries to do the opposite of whatever Lionel tells him to do'. (I'm not absolutely positive about that one, though, because lord knows there may be an exception to that that happened during the series sometime that I'm somehow blanking on. Meh.) Also, Clark is a much better foil for Lex than Lionel, and this may be one of the central reasons why I started getting really, really *grr* about later seasons of Smallville. (*grr*)
> 
> Also, can we _sense_ the irony of the episode name they picked for this one? ( _Thank_ you.)
> 
> (Yes, I realize that the chapter 4 mandate comes into play here, and I ignored it with impunity! Impunity, I say! Impunity! :-P )
> 
> AN2: This one ended where another one will begin. I’ll get to it later. Basically, it will be a part two of “consequences”, with a lesser side-note of “why does no-one ever talk things out?” (mainly because that second one isn’t exactly a hard-and-fast rule in Smallville, but does stick for the most part; also, I really want to write it).


	6. Oliver Queen gets a free pass on anything he does, eventually (Oliver Queen)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This DC-mandate is the one that states that, sooner or later, Oliver Queen gets a free pass on anything and everything he does. ...No, really. He's worse than Lana this way, even, because he still gets called a hero at the end of all of it, and even seems to believe it. (There are generally consequences for him, but eventually whatever-it-is is either handled and he explicitly gets away with it, or is forgotten, or is let go of by whomever.)
> 
> More ranting in the chapter area below on this one, because these chapter summary / author's note areas can (still) only hold so much text ^_^;;
> 
> (And yes, Chapter 5 will get its “part 2”, but it’s taking a lot longer to write (and is gonna be a lot longer in wordcount) than I’d originally thought. Since this and other ‘mandates have been waiting in the wings for some time, rather than keep stalling because of that one not being done yet, I’m moving ahead with this one and others. Hope that’s okay!)
> 
> Character voice: Oliver Queen

~*~*~*~*~*~  
Let's look at the facts, shall we?

\-- Oliver bullies Lex and a friend of his all throughout his middle and high school years at Excelsior Prep, with two goons to help him pull it off. Oliver's reason for bullying Lex? He just doesn't seem to have any, other than that he wanted to at the time. Canon certainly doesn't give one for him. Outcome? Lex gets pushed to near-insanity during his time at the school, attacking his own friend while under the direct influence of stress from Oliver's own behavior. Lex's only friend ends up comatose while Lex and the other bully-boys think he died, and when the comatose once-friend tries to get even (through meteor-rock experimentation a la Lionel), the ex-friend kills everybody in the group except Oliver and Lex... because Clark gets in the way. Nobody ever calls Oliver out on his behavior except Lex, and Lex gets ignored. In the end, Lex basically gives up on pursuing justice on it.

(The closest comparable comparable thing for Lana here is what happens after Lionel blackmails her into marrying Lex. Her "bullying" starts because she thinks he faked her pregnancy -- something which canon is never completely clear about being true or not. She performs corporate espionage on Lex, and Lex knows about it, during their marriage. When Lex gets trapped underground, she sits back and doesn't give the tunnel maps to the search teams... until Clark goes in after him. After telling Lex she wants a divorce and declaring that she never loved him, she is hit by him -- leaving him horrified with himself and immediately apologetic -- and so she hits him back, embezzles a million dollars from him, and sets things up to have him put in jail for her own faked death. Post-divorce, she puts up cameras to spy on him in the mansion and elsewhere and continues the corporate espionage. Lex goes along with it all and does nothing to fight back against her, thinking he deserves it, up until she steals a superpower-skinsuit and destroys the rest of the research -- supposedly the last project Lex had left that could've kept him alive after the Arctic at the time. Lex then sets up the whole Kryptonite-bomb-on-the-top-of-the-Daily-Planet thing, which involves making Lana unable to be physically near Clark. He doesn't try to set off the bomb at any point.)

\-- Oliver hires two thugs to kidnap and torture Lex after Lex was possessed by Zod because he wanted to know what happened and how Lex did it. Lana gets pulled into it, too, trying to find and save Lex, they both end up trying to kill their captors in self-defense, and Clark ends up having to rescue Lex and Lana both from _burning alive_ in an otherwise-assured fiery death. Outcome? Oliver never gets found out for doing this.

(Lana pulls a similar thing with Lionel (sort of?) by getting him taken in by a crazy woman, who keeps him tied to a bed and eventually tries to kill him; Lionel gets away on his own.)

\-- Oliver, as the Green Arrow, steals from a lot of wealthy businessmen, up to and including a necklace right off of Martha Kent's neck that belonged to Lionel Luthor, terrorizing her in the process. This pisses off Clark, who tries to catch him, clearly with thoughts of turning him over to the police. Outcome? When Clark catches up to Green Arrow, Oliver sees Clark doing something metahuman-ish, and Clark ends up not turning him in because he knows that if he does, Oliver will talk about Clark's powers. (So, basically, Oliver holds what he knows about Clark's secret over his head.) Interim outcome? When Lois figures out his secret identity, instead of turning him in to the authorities for being a thief and a vigilante, she finds out from some digging that he was stealing things that had been stolen prior, and giving away the items or money/proceeds to public institutions that needed the money. This somehow makes it okay, because it's a little like Robin Hood, except not so much, and she starts writing glowing articles about him in the Daily Planet. Final outcome? When Oliver comes forward as being the Green Arrow, he hires lawyers to get him off all of his old charges from his thieving days and hires PR staff to spin things positively, too. (So, basically, he gets off for all of this completely.)

(Lana doesn't really do anything similar that I can think of. She only ever steals from Lex.)

\-- Oliver, as the Green Arrow, kills Lex with an arrow to the gut while raging out on healing serum. The actual circumstances? Green Arrow showed up in Lex's office after-hours and tries to threaten Lex into signing away a good chunk of his fortune with death-by-arrow, and Lex manages to pull a gun on him; they both try to shoot each other, Lex in self-defense. Clark doesn't get there in time to stop any of it, but is able to save Lex with a dose of the same healing serum, while Oliver tries to convince him not to do just that. Outcome? Oliver gets a free pass on this because he's high at the time; it's a side-effect of the serum. Apparently this is okay because he'd be half-dead himself otherwise ...from the risks he was taking during the episode because he knew he had the serum to fall back on. Oh, and the project the healing serum came from? LuthorCorp-funded, but Oliver managed to subvert the doctor in charge of the project so that they were working more for him than for Lex.

(Lana tries to kill Lex when she's souped up on half of Clark's powers once, possibly a bit insane at the time a la Eric Summers, and Clark stops her.)

\-- Oliver, as the Green Arrow, creates and funds the League, which performs (yet more) corporate espionage against Lex and LuthorCorp, and keeps destroying his super-soldier projects. (...which were supposed to be used to fight Kryptonians like Zod, because Lex thought invasion and human extinction was imminent.) Outcome? Clark ends up being okay with what Oliver's doing, because Lex caught Bart and was torturing him for destroying several multimillion-dollar LuthorCorp facilities prior to his capture, and Oliver said that they were fighting Project 33.1 and that Lex was trying to create an army. (...which were supposed to be used to fight Kryptonians like Zod, because Lex thought invasion and human extinction was imminent.)

Note that Oliver had no real files on or proof of what the program actually was prior to Bart's rescue, and he uses those stolen files to direct the League to destroy even more LuthorCorp facilities worldwide associated with the project. Yet the viewer only gets conflicting hints on what even happens to the various meta/humans in the project, before and after this point. From what the show does share, it seems that metahumans are more well-treated than not while actually in the program, and those that aren't completely batshit insane are allowed to stay in the program, under Lex's reign over things (-- though humans are another story, and things under Tess' reign are a whole different can of worms). Since 'evil metahuman experimentation' is put forth as the big no-no that Oliver says the League is trying to fight, Oliver's basically lying here, as far as canon shows elsewhere. (Remember, the main complaint of the homicidal meteor freaks that took Clark's family hostage was that they got _pulled_ from the program, not that they were put in it in the first place -- they _liked_ being in it.)

Note also that while Lex is apparently in the process of trying to create a metahuman army, _Oliver already has one and is actively using it to decimate his main business competitor's company_. (Oh, and Clark and Chloe are both okay with this and wish him well at the end of the episode.)

(Lana funds the Isis Foundation with her ill-gotten gains embezzled from Lex, which she uses to perform corporate espionage, help meteor freaks, and keep Chloe off the streets, so she's slightly more benign.)

\-- Oliver, as the Green Arrow, actively spends months trying to track Lex down and kill him, over-and-over again. The excuse for this is that Lex used the Orb on Clark that was meant to control Kal-El... and then Lex got mortally injured and proceeded to spend his time trying to find a way to stay alive and heal up a bit, rather than spend any time anywhere near Clark or try to order Clark around in the least. So obviously Lex needs killing badly. *rolls eyes* Oliver doesn't get a free pass on this because he doesn't _need_ one; apparently the only person to find out he's doing this is Lana, and neither rats the other out to anybody, if I remember correctly.

(Oliver actually runs into Lana while doing this, so they're neck-and-neck there. And we know he's trying to kill Lex because the arrow he shoots when he thinks he's found him goes straight into a decoy-mannequin's _skull_. We know Lana's trying to kill Lex because she high kicks the decoy-mannequin's skull straight off of its body.)

\-- Oliver kills Lex (or a clone of Lex, but he thinks he kills Lex) with one of Toyman's bombs. The fallout from this involves Toyman trying to force Oliver to admit that he killed Lex (not Toyman), Clark writing him off (...temporarily, until he realizes that Oliver's gonna be not just suicidal about it, but depressed, too), and Chloe 'redeeming' Oliver through dubious and highly manipulative methods. Then, for reasons we can't explain, everybody acts like it never happened.

(Lana, who has stolen Lex's skin-powersuit at the time, holds Clark back from approaching the van. She sort-of gets a pass on this one.)

So, yeah. Oliver is kind of worse, and does worse for less "reason" than Lana does, and in the end gets off completely scot-free with everyone.

In contrast, the only two people Lex actively runs around trying to premeditatively murder over the course of the entire show? Morgan Edge and Lionel Luthor, who are both criminal masterminds, and who have both attempted to kill Lex on multiple occasions first.

Yeah, sure, I guess Oliver only trying to actively kill one person over the course of the entire show (Lex), to Lex's two (Edge and Lionel), is just _fine_ by comparison... if we're only playing a numbers game here.

Our hero, ladies and gentleman. *rolls eyes*

...Now, I bet you're all ready for Oliver getting his just desserts now, right? Hah! --No. Because if I can wooby Lex, I can wooby Oliver, too. :-P

There's actually a very good reason why Oliver might have decided to start going after Lex so very hardcore post-Excelsior -- one that never gets so much as a measly side-mention in show canon.

Let's start with the basics:

(1) Y'all may have actually noticed that Oliver doesn't go after Lex at all until after the whole thing with Zod, which starts off with Lex's kidnapping and torture for information, yes? And while Lex gives the truth straight-off first thing to his kidnapper-cum-torturer, he isn't believed and the knowledge isn't relayed to Oliver after the fact.

(2) Chloe notes, while searching for Zoner impacts, that the only satellite that was operational during the attack was a Queen Industries satellite, using the images from that satellite for her search, so we know that this is how Oliver knew to go after Lex for some answers -- he saw "Lex" (Zod) attack the Pentagon on Dark Thursday (...not that he knew about Zod, or aliens at all, until much, much later).

(3) During "Justice", when Clark and Oliver are talking, it's clear that (a) Oliver doesn't know Clark is an alien since he doesn't know about his issues with Kryptonite, and (b) he has no idea what Clark is dealing with "on the side" with Chloe -- all the Kryptonian Zoner stuff that's the fallout from the whole Zod mess -- that has Clark unwilling to help the League with taking down 33.1 facilities with them.

(4) Oliver only seems 'in-the-know' about any Kryptonian stuff at all around-abouts the time when the whole mess with Davis/Doomsday goes down, well _after_ Lex is dead.

So, given this timeline of information-gathering and sharing, it would be perfectly logical for Oliver to have believed that...

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex Luthor was going to take over the world.

If anyone had told Oliver that a year ago? He'd have laughed in their face. Because _Lex?_ Lex Luthor? Try to take over the world? No way!

The only problem was... Oliver wasn't laughing. Because it wasn't a year ago, it was today, and he was sitting in a jungle in South America, bow at the ready, to take on another 33.1 LuthorCorp facility in another godforsaken corner of the globe, ignoring the bugs that were trying to eat him alive while waiting for a signal from Vic and Bart.

Because it was true.

Lex Luthor was going to take over the world.

He'd already tried it once -- and failed, thank god. Whatever process he'd gone through to give himself superpowers had been temporary.

He wasn't stopping, though. Apparently, if he couldn't be a one-man army -- punching, burning, and _flying_ through whatever resistance he damn well pleased to _decimate_ , like stomping ants under jackboots -- he'd lie, and hide his involvement as best as he could, playing the philanthropist billionaire in the meantime... and while he thought no-one was looking, and no-one would pay attention, secretly make for himself a much-larger army. One that could be rotated out with fresh recruits for the duration, even if he couldn't come up with a permanent process that would work.

Well, Oliver was looking, and he wasn't about to let him get away with it.

Unfortunately, Lex kept getting frighteningly closer and closer to success. Oliver was barely keeping pace with him, with the 33.1 projects, trying to stall him, if not stop him outright. He was almost surprised that Lex hadn't tried any of the results of the various 33.1 projects that Oliver knew about on himself, and then come after them all himself -- except that maybe he _had_ tried it and those newer processes just wouldn't stick, a side-effect of whatever failed process he'd gone through the first time.

...That, or maybe he wanted nothing less than a perfected version of what he'd had before, and refused to settle for anything less.

Oliver knew Lex was (still) a Warrior Angel fanatic, but this was fucking ridiculous. Didn't he know that he was more a Devilicus than a hero, pulling this shit?

Then again, maybe insanity was a side-effect of things, too.

It was kind of too bad. Oliver felt guilty about it, whenever he thought about whatever must have pushed Lex over the edge to begin with, trying to figure it out. Lex had always had an overinflated sense of justice before, back at Excelsior Prep. Maybe if Oliver hadn't bullied him so badly... if they'd been friends, instead of something like enemies -- as Lex liked to put it whenever Green Arrow showed up -- maybe Lex would've said something first, talked to him, and Oliver would've seen it coming. Maybe been able to stop it. Maybe even been able to talk him out of it.

Too late now.

Far too late.

Lex had killed thousands, and injured millions, and single-handedly caused damages in the hundreds of billions of dollars, worldwide.

And he was trying to build up an unstoppable army, with metahuman powers, so he could do it all again. Finish the job he'd started.

He had to be stopped.

And Oliver knew that while Green Arrow and his League could stop LuthorCorp, stop all the experimentation and these projects... Lex was too stubborn to let that stop _him_. Oliver knew Lex, and he knew better than to be fooled into thinking that, no matter what Lex said or did. Because he knew better.

Lex would never stop. He would never stop trying. He would never stop _fighting_.

Lex would only stop fighting when he was dead.

So if Oliver had to kill him to save everyone else, he would. He had to.

No matter what.

He'd take the consequences of killing his childhood friend, gladly, even if it meant dying himself.

...He kind of hoped it did. He didn't think he'd be able to live with himself afterwards.

There was a rustle of bushes in front of him, across the clear expanse by the side of the building, next to the guarded door, and the heavily-armed men guarding it. Bart, returning from reconnaissance, to where Vic lay in wait.

Vic gave the signal.

Oliver stood up.

And Green Arrow started shooting.

~*~*~*~*~*~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: ...aaaand then canon happened and Oliver was suicidal after killing Lex. Because, frankly, I think that makes a lot more sense. (And it still counts in this series of things, because it would at least leave _Oliver himself_ with thinking that he hadn't gotten away with anything there, in doing so, regardless of what Chloe or anybody else might say afterwards. ...And a lasting guilt after he finds out about Kryptonians and Zod and the truth of everything that happened to Lex, later in the series. Thus, **lasting** consequences. --Hah! :) ;)


	7. Clark Kent is an only child (Jonathan Kent, Lex Luthor)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This DC-mandate is the one that states that Kal-El, when adopted by the childless Kents, is and remains an only child. (Admittedly, I am being somewhat specific here for a reason. There have now been a handful of canon AU's in DC-comics-land that don't have him raised by the Kents, and for Smallville an in-canon AU where Clark was raised Luthor -- and thus technically had siblings in the form of Lex and Tess(!) -- but as far as I’m aware, any time he's been an adopted son of the _Kents_ , he’s it -- no siblings for him.)
> 
> What is particularly egregious about this one in Smallville-land is that the writers actually looked all set to break new ground here, mid-season 2. I was _really_ looking forward to this one -- so much that could be done here! ... And then they go off and have the truck crash like that at the end of season 2, just because Jonathan slammed the brakes too hard(!? wtf??). (...Oh, yeah, that was _Jonathan_ who canonically screwed that one up, by the way, _not_ Clark. The EMP the spaceship set off when it exploded did _not_ flatten the town, thanks, so the supposed "shockwave” front had to have only been the EMP portion of the blast -- thus, the carrying wavefront couldn't have hit the truck with enough force to have been the cause of it flipping over. So, by canonical-Smallville-reasoning, the ‘flipping over’ would have to have been a result of Jonathan hitting the brakes. Except…)
> 
> \--Trucks do not flip end-over-end from hitting the brakes too hard like that, people! Not without help! (Tractor-trailer, maybe. Motorcycle, definitely! But a freaking _truck?!?_ No, no, and no. They design those things _specifically_ not to do that. It’s a safety thing.) And _even if they did_ , the pulse was past them almost immediately, nothing more to react to past the initial startlement, thus Jonathan would've _let go_ of the brakes out of reflex once he felt the truck start to go out of control! (He drives a frigging tractor for a living, for christ’s sake -- he knows what you’re supposed to do -- and _not_ do -- when you’re going too fast in a piece of machinery with a center of gravity that’s too high for the speed at which you’re travelling -- if you hit the brakes a little too hard, it’ll start to tip. Not that trucks are like tractors that way.) --Oh, yeah, and that's completely disregarding the fact that EM pulses are not actually visible to the naked human eye!
> 
> As stated on Wikipedia (emphasis mine): “A pulse of electromagnetic energy typically comprises many frequencies from DC (zero Hz) to some upper limit depending on the source. The range defined as EMP, sometimes referred to as "DC to daylight", _**excludes** the_ highest frequencies comprising the _**optical**_ (infrared, visible, ultraviolet) and ionizing (X and gamma rays) _ranges_. _**Some** types of EMP events **can** leave an optical trail, such as **lightning and sparks** , but **these are side effects of the current flow through the air and are not part of the EMP itself.**_ ”
> 
> That wasn’t what we saw in the special effects -- it was represented by a wavefront, not sparks. Jonathan shouldn't've seen it coming to act on its approach in the first place, to panic and try to stomp on the brakes! The worst that would have happened had the writers been the _least_ bit realistic about things should have been the sparkplugs and/or the battery dying on them, and Jonathan and Martha wondering what the hell was going on as the truck came coasting to a complete stop on its own. Egregious!
> 
> Character voices: Jonathan Kent, Lex Luthor

~*~*~*~*~*~

By the time Jonathan got them home and they found Clark, he was in a state. It didn't help that their truck had died halfway to the farm for no reason, and had refused to start up again. But, when they did finally get there...

The storm cellar looked like it had been bombed out of existence, the spaceship was gone, Clark was a mess, and Clark’s clothing was in tatters -- he looked like he’d been at the middle of ground zero itself.

And, by the time Jonathan Kent had gotten a stammering explanation out of a shell-shocked Clark, to finally understand what had happened...

...his wife was pissed at all three of them (Pete included) for not having told her what had been going on right from the start.

\-----

Lex pulled up into the driveway to the Kent farmhouse. It was his first real stop, after arriving back in town. He'd hit the mansion, walked into the garage, and grabbed the first car he’d seen. He hadn't even bothered changing clothes or taking a shower first. He knew what he wanted, and he was aiming to get it.

By the time Lex had brought the car to a halt, Clark was poking his head out of the barn.

"...Lex?”

Lex smiled as he shoved open the car door and used it as a brace to push himself upright.

Clark hovered nearby, uncertainly.

The first thing Lex did once he was upright again was to pull Clark into a hug.

At first, all Clark did was give out a slight gasp and catch him, wrapping his arms around him reflexively. But, shortly after, Lex found himself the recipient of what at first he’d thought was going to be a crushing bear hug, but turned out to be a firm but gentle, all-encompassing hug, instead.

“ _Lex_ ,” he heard Clark breathe out in something like pure relief.

Lex grinned.

And then he closed his eyes and savored the sensation. --No. To be fair, he _reveled_ in it.

"Miss me?" he asked, already knowing the answer, and Clark let out a laugh and just squeezed him a little bit, wrapping his arms around Lex even more fully.

His most basic needs now met, other things began to occur to him as he held onto Clark -- most notably, the amount of tension in his young friend's shoulders and back that he was only now beginning to release.

After a while, Lex realized that Clark wasn’t letting go anytime soon -- not without prompting -- and so Lex was the one to slowly draw back. Just enough to really take a good look at Clark’s face.

“Clark, what’s wrong?” he asked. But Clark simply shook his head before letting it drop to Lex’s shoulder.

Lex hadn’t realized it before, in his own relief to see him, but Clark looked _tired_. He wasn’t sure why, but that _bothered_ him. Greatly.

“I’m really glad you're back,” he heard Clark mumble into his shoulder. “I’m _really_ glad you're okay.”

 _For varying values of okay, I certainly am,_ Lex thought, though he dearly wished he could have been able to just say ‘yes’ to him, instead. But Louis...

...was gone now, the thought of him merely lurking in the comers of Lex's mind, and he had to have had malaria on that island, to cause the persistent high fever that had led to such vivid hallucinations; those doctors didn't know what they were talking about, with their antibody levels and their skepticism. Obviously. Louis had… Lex shook himself. --The _sailors_ who had found him had been sure that he'd been ill with the disease, and they would know. He didn't get sick often -- couldn't remember a time when he had been. So it made perfect sense that the one time he _was_ left flat on his back from severe illness would have been under extraordinary circumstances.

Clark, however, had decidedly _not_ been stuck on a deserted island under starvation conditions and limited drinking water for three months with no sign of rescue in sight. So what was the source of his friend's fatigue?

Lex frowned, and he was about to ask after it again, when he heard the cry of an infant.

He froze in place, went completely rigid.

Clark, on the other hand, just about collapsed in his arms, like he’d just taken one hit too many. He pulled away from Lex, wavering on his feet, and now looked downright exhausted.

"What…” Lex trailed off as he realized that Clark had heard it too, and that the sound was coming from the direction of the farmhouse.

And it seemed that Clark was unsurprised, that he’d been almost expecting it. ...Dreading it? Lex watched him run a hand through his hair, looking harried.

"What in the world… Clark?” he queried, looking back up at his friend. "Is your mother babysitting?” It was the only possible explanation Lex could think of.

Clark let out a harsh laugh. "No.”

Lex blinked up at him.

"That,” said Clark, apparently referring to the unbroken caterwauling coming from the farmhouse, "Is the newest addition to the Kent family household: Claire Kent.”

Lex stared up at Clark, who had a very thin sort of smile on his face, one that was so icy it should have looked out of place. Coupled with the exhaustion and the dark circles under his eyes, though...

"...I wasn't aware that your parents were looking to adopt,” _again,_ was the unspoken addition, as Lex approached the topic carefully, sideways, because how else would there be a new baby in the house? Clark didn't exactly seem _happy_ about it, after all, but he'd thought Clark open and willing -- if not wistful -- when it came to the idea of more siblings; his parents were another story.

Clark's smile thinned out further. "They didn't.” At Lex's continued lack of comprehension, he added, "Mom got pregnant a while ago.”

"What?!" He’d only been gone three months! Lex had thought Martha being infertile had been the reason for Clark's adoption in the first place. And when had she gotten pregnant, exactly? If anyone had asked him, he'd have thought it more likely that Clark might've gotten some girl pregnant -- not that he'd consider that to be remotely possible, either!

Clark nodded once -- acknowledging the insanity of the situation, apparently. "Mom didn't even tell us about it, not right away. Not for months. And she gave birth to Claire last week, a little prematurely."

"...All right.” Lex recentered himself, and his worldview as pertaining to the Kents; he was nothing if not adaptable. He could work his way through this quagmire of almost well-nigh-on impossible events. Then curiosity got the better of him, and he asked, "So, what's your little sister like?”

Clark, of all things, _grimaced_ at this. "I don't know," Clark told him. He looked down at his hands. "Mom still won't let me hold her.”

Lex felt his eyes go wide, and he tried not to suck in his breath in dismay, because _that_ wasn't a good sign.

After a long silence, Lex tried: "...well, she is a preemie, yes? Maybe your mother's just being a little overprotective?”

"She lets dad hold her.”

Lex digested this silently.

"Can you think of any reason she might not want you to hold her?” Lex asked, fully expecting the answer to be a resounding 'no!' so he could then immediately progress to reassuring Clark from there.

Instead, Clark gave him a sickly smile.

"Sure," Clark said, flexing his fingers by his sides. "She's afraid I'll hurt her.”

Lex stared up at him in horror. "You wouldn't do that!”

"Not on purpose,” Clark confirmed, and Lex's stomach dropped to his feet.

"--How much sleep have you been getting?” Lex asked him, feeling a little faint, and more than a little panicked, weirdly -- not even sure why he was asking the question, just that he felt like he had to. That it was deathly important.

"Not a lot,” Clark told him. "I can still hear her from the house.”

"You've been sleeping in the loft?” Lex asked, a little incredulously. Dumb question, but Clark nodded at him.

Wonderful. Clark had been exiled from his own house. Lex was honestly afraid to ask whether it had been self-imposed, or…

Worse, the jittery feeling he’d gotten at Clark’s admission of sleeplessness wasn’t going away. It made him want to twitch horribly.

“Maybe I should’ve just left my parents like he told me to,” he heard Clark murmur to himself, head down, as he stared at his hands again.

“What?” Lex asked, eyes narrowing slightly, because who was this ‘he’?

Clark shook his head once before he looked up, but didn't otherwise respond to him, let alone answer the question.

"--Let's go to the mansion,” Lex said abruptly, grabbing Clark’s hand and tugging him towards the car, because approaching the elder Kents in their house seemed like a daunting and markedly, deeply _unwise_ decision at-present -- and he was perfectly capable of avoiding unpleasant confrontations with the best of them, thank you.

"Why?” Clark said, not moving an inch. Yet.

As though he needed a reason.

Lex was happy to supply him with a reason.

"--Because there's running water there," Lex told him promptly. "And food. And _beds_.” Oh, he was never going to take a proper bed for granted again. Yes, he’d had better than the cold, hard ground since the island, in the form of a cot on the ship, and the seats on the plane coming back (not that he was entirely certain how he'd managed to force himself onto another plane after everything that had happened, except for being deliriously tired and wanting to be _home_ more than anything else...). But. A real _bed_ , oh my. --And no bugs!

"... And electricity?” Clark put forth, looking at him a tad oddly.

"Bah." Lex waved this way. "It's barely fall. I could survive without electricity or gas heat for a few weeks, if I had to.” And it wasn’t like he didn’t have a fireplace or two that could be used easily for that. God help him if he'd been stuck on anything but a tropical island during winter, though. All his food -- what little he'd had -- had come from hunting and gathering. He'd have starved shortly before freezing to death.

“But it is quiet,” Lex said, with a little more consideration. Clark could likely use a real bed in a quiet environment, as well. The couch in his "fortress” wasn't exactly made for sleeping on, and the hammock in the corner barely served as more than a swinging chair.

Quiet was something Lex had gotten a little too much of on the island -- or, rather, a lack of ~~real and relatively sane~~ people -- and then he’d been subjected to what had felt like unending crowds on the boats and ships and planes since. So with all the bouncing between extremes he’d been subjected to, ‘quiet’ was something Lex really might enjoy having again -- as long as it wasn’t a quiet with no people in it at all. But a little bit of relative privacy would not go amiss, and with Clark there, Lex wouldn’t be alone.

“I think we could both use a little peaceful quiet, right now,” Lex said firmly.

Clark gave him an uncertain smile, but he got in the car with him.

They left the wailing infant and her biological parents behind in short order.

Only after they arrived at the mansion, to be greeted by Lex's cook at the back entrance and ushered inside for feeding, did it occur to Lex that it had been odd that Clark’s parents hadn’t shown up to accost him or them. Neither of Clark's parents had even so much as glanced outside following his car's noisy arrival, to see who had arrived and what was going on.

\-----

“Ahhhh, _bed_ ,” Lex mumbled out worshipfully, as he made to topple face-first onto a _fine_ example of humanity’s most marvellous invention of such an ingenious device. He’d _finally_ managed to make his way to his bedroom again, after having gotten ambushed by his house staff on the way in.

Apparently, not getting noticed the first time he’d blown through on his quick jaunt in-and-out, only long enough to grab his car and head for the Kent property, had been a fluke. This time, he’d been caught up with, and in short order he’d been fussed over, and talked at, and fed -- or, well, had food pushed at him, which Clark was currently carrying around for him dutifully enough -- and he really just wanted to collapse now, thank you. The rest could wait until after a nice, comfortable nap on his lovely, pillowy cushiony bed.

“Lex, wait.” He felt himself stalled out and dangling mid-air, before he was pulled back upright, more or less, by a hand wrapped around his waist.

...Or not.

Lex sighed, getting his feet under him again, but mostly he was perfectly content to just lean back against Clark’s chest and twist sideways a bit to stare up at his friend, for the moment. “Hmmm?”

Clark slid the tray of food -- which he was holding one-handed, no less -- onto the bedside table, and with both hands now free, he turned Lex around and sat him down on the side of the bed instead. “You really should clean up or something first, before you do that,” Lex was told.

“Clean up?” Lex said.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Clark asked him, gesturing at Lex’s face.

“...No?” Lex said, not sure what Clark was getting at. He made to touch his face with his fingertips, and got his wrist encircled and restrained by a frowning Clark.

He sighed as Clark told him, “Stay put,” and let go of him to disappear away, off into his bathroom.

He started to fall backwards to lie flat on his back on his bed instead, then levered himself upright with hands and elbows again with reasonable speed at the look Clark gave him when he re-emerged. Clark was carrying a washcloth, and what looked like some first-aid supplies, the latter of which were set down on the bed next to him.

“Ow,” Lex said, wincing away, as Clark knelt down in front of him and applied wet washcloth to face.

Clark grimaced a little at him in sympathy. “How long have you had these?” he asked, as he took a light hold of Lex’s chin, then reached for him with a corner of the washcloth again. “What are they?”

“What are what?” Lex asked him. He tried not to wince away again, at whatever he had on his face that obviously existed, because it stung when Clark tried to wipe at them -- to clean them?

“You’re bleeding a little bit,” Clark told him, as he moved to a location higher up on his forehead. “You’ve got these weird rashes or wounds or something, all over your face.” He stopped his ministrations for a moment to frown at him again. “Haven’t you looked in a mirror?”

Lex sat in place, keeping his hands out of the way, and simply said, “I only just got back.”

Clark blinked at him, and it was never more clear that his friend really was tired, from the amount of time it took him to progress from a blank look at first, to something resembling informed understanding when he realized how Lex’s itinerary homeward-bound must’ve gone.

He shook his head and got back to his cleaning.

After a while, they both ended up in the bathroom, Lex sitting on the edge of the sink counter, legs dangling off of the side, while Clark rinsed out and wetted down the washcloth again, progressing from Lex’s face, to the back of his head, and then farther down to points all over his torso -- front, sides, and back -- after a short flurry of activity getting his shirt off of him.

Lex was swaying in place and all but falling asleep sitting up by the end of it. The water Clark was using was warm, and whatever he was doing with the washing and the unguents and the band-aids was apparently helping, because all the little aches and hurts he hadn’t realized he’d had were slowly being replaced with little areas of coolness, and he was feeling more and more relaxed by the end of each little bit of it.

He was dozing face-first into Clark’s shoulder by the time Clark was finished with his back. Lex straightened up slightly when he felt Clark’s hands curl around his waist, to see his friend looking -- well, even more tired… but he also seemed to be eyeing Lex’s pants as if he was considering something.

“That can probably wait,” Lex muttered, and he tilted forward, planting his nose in the dip between Clark’s neck and his collarbone again.

For some reason, Clark gave out a soft laugh at this pronouncement, but he didn’t protest. He just slid his hands under Lex’s thighs and lifted him up against him like a little kid, like he weighed nothing, and brought him back out to the other room.

He more-or-less poured Lex back down onto the bedsheets, and made to leave -- for another room, Lex assumed -- but he stopped in place when Lex managed to reach out to snag a sleeve as he turned.

“Please,” Lex said quietly, and that was all it took. Clark kicked off his shoes and climbed into bed with him without a word, or any sense of reservation.

Lex let his eyes slide shut. He was asleep within seconds.

\-----

Lex woke when he was hungry, grabbed something to munch on from the tray -- _so convenient!_ \-- and grumbled a little to himself when he ditched his pants and finished what Clark had started earlier in the bathroom on his own. It downright _hurt_ now, and it was awkward going, and he realized that he really should’ve completely availed himself of Clark’s services from the start.

Clark was dead to the world now, though, conked out on the bed where Lex had left him lying. Lex wasn’t going to wake him for anything in the world just then; it was obvious he needed the sleep.

Lex washed his hands after he was done applying the last band-aid, then he brushed his teeth, rubbed at his eyes, and trudged himself back to bed. He didn’t bother with pajamas; he got under the covers this time.

He settled in, facing Clark, who was sprawled out in a restrained sort of way. His young friend was expressionless but for the thin lines of fatigue that were still etched into his face; he was tense more than relaxed, but those lines of tension were gently easing, and he was beautiful and quiet and _real_ and _**there**_.

Lex watched Clark for a while in the dim light, breathing. Slow and steady. When his eyes grew heavy, he closed them and listened to the soft sounds of Clark, just being alive.

It was restful.

\-----

 _I don’t need a nursemaid,_ was what Lex was going to say to him, but the look on Clark’s face had him biting his tongue and silencing himself.

He’d had enough of silence on the island -- too much -- so much that he’d almost forgotten what he sounded like to himself, when he spoke. Words hadn’t helped him while he was there, and he wasn’t entirely sure whether he’d been speaking aloud to himself or not, when he’d thought he’d been talking to Louis.

But while he could remember what he’d said, he couldn’t for the life of him remember how he _sounded_ , and that scared him, a little bit. It made him want to talk aloud, babble almost, so that he could hear himself think and _know_ without having to try desperately to remember what he’d long-past begun to forget.

It was frighteningly easy not to talk.

Clark was there, and they sat in silence on the couch in his library. They lay on their backs, side-by-side, staring at the ceiling, with their legs dangling off the edges of the seat cushions. Nothing and nobody bothered them, except for the quiet ticking of the clock on the wall over by the staircase, the wind blowing past the windows, the creaking of wood and cushioned plush fabric as it shifted under body weight.

The quiet and the peace were shattered, when ‘alone’ wasn’t a worry worth mentioning of Lex’s anymore, and Lex said, “Helen.”

\-----

The mansion wasn’t quiet anymore, with Helen there.

Lex had thought she was dead.

(He’d barely survived himself; how had she?)

The Kent farmhouse wasn’t any better, with ear-shattering wailing displacing any other noise.

It was, however, more peaceful.

...Well, sort of. Clark’s _loft_ was more peaceful. Lex doubted the house was -- not with whatever flurry of activity must be going on in there to try and quiet the very loud, very unhappy-sounding little one -- and he wasn’t about to brave passing across that threshold, to see the other Kents and ask.

Clark was lying listlessly in his hammock, staring upwards at nothing, looking for the world like he’d rather be stabbed in the gut with something sharp, please, than have to continue on being subjected to hearing even one more second of infantile crying.

Lex debated telling him that that would do nothing for helping to prevent the sound from drilling his way into his brain. If anything, it’d only make things worse. Gut wounds were notorious for either killing you outright from the shock of the wound, or leaving you taking days to die from slowly-creeping sepsis in brutal agony.

The former might be worth it, depending on one’s point of view, but the latter tended to leave one unable to move, which would leave him still within range of the unbearable sound and then -- worse -- newly unable to escape it by any means. It was hardly worth the risk.

“Have you tried staying over at Pete’s, yet?” Lex asked him, and found much to his surprise, and Clark’s embarrassed dismay, that no, he had not.

If only Lex’s own problems were so easily dispatched with.

...It wasn’t as though he could stay over at Lana’s house, after all. Nell might be willing to put him up for a few nights, so he wouldn’t have to go back to the mansion, but they only lived a mile away from the Kents, and sound _traveled_ in the flatlands of Kansas.

\-----

Lex was newly reintroduced to the fact that Helen was grating.

He’d known this from the start, but, somehow, he’d forgotten it. ...Or maybe he’d simply grown inured to it through daily and near-constant exposure. He’d clearly lost that internal callus, though, in the intervening months away from her.

“I want a divorce,” was far too easy to say.

‘I want to help you, but I don’t know how,’ was all but impossible.

Clark was a distant moon orbiting a small constellation of Kents. It was _wrong_ \-- Clark shouldn’t be small, or dark. Or waning, as though passing into shadow.

He felt that way, though. It was obvious. Even Lex could see it.

Lex took him to the Talon after his chores were done, for coffee. They sat in one of the small booths, not the big comfy chairs, so they could be shoulder-to-shoulder. There was too much space between them, otherwise.

Lex didn’t say anything. Their silences grew bigger; their distances grew smaller.

\-----

“What’s she like?” Lana asked Clark, as she handed him his latte.

“I don’t know,” Clark told her, and Lex looked away.

He didn’t want to know how weary Clark felt. If Lana was surprised. If he, as Clark’s friend, was supposed to say something.

“...I’m not sure I want to find out,” Clark told Lex quietly, as he finished his drink, and stared at the wall.

But not out the window. Never out the window. It was sunny out.

Clark’s parents walked by. The baby wasn’t crying, for once. Though Lex was sure somebody was. Somewhere.

Lex didn’t say a word.

\-----

Helen was… not happy about the prenuptial agreement standing.

Lex was a little puzzled as to how much of his money Helen had managed to spend in such a short period of time.

The worst part was, it didn’t even hurt.

The mandated LuthorCorp psych sessions for corporate wellness compliance that Lionel forced him into were an annoyance at best, a nuisance at worst. Lex drifted right through them, like a silent ship in the night, with nary a protest or a ripple on his psyche due to them. He didn’t talk about the divorce; he barely thought about it.

He was too busy bleeding for Clark to care about much of anything else.

‘Do you know how to help a friend who’s slowly losing his life right in front of you?’ he almost asked. But he didn’t think his psychologist would know the answer. It was too normal a question for her, he believed.

And too devastating to ask for a response.

The five stages of grief were: anger, disbelief, denial, bargaining, acceptance. Lex wondered which one he was in.

Sometimes he woke up from nightmares, still thinking he was on the island for a few scrambled moments. Hallucinating. Clark had been too good to be true.

He wasn’t sure _what_ Clark was, now.

\-----

“This place is too big.”

It was something of a big revelation, for all that it came from small words, ones that didn’t even echo in the quiet of the mansion.

Lex turned to Clark. Clark was flat on his back, arms folded behind his head. His eyes were closed; he blinked them open, and then he was staring at the ceiling.

“This place is too big,” Lex repeated, turning back to stare upwards. Then he grimaced and pushed himself upright. It was like an itch, now: _this place is too big._

Clark took a big breath in, and let it out again.

“...I guess,” said Clark, distantly, closing his eyes again.

“It is,” Lex confirmed, frowning. He pulled a knee up to his chest, looked down at Clark, who hadn’t moved much on the bed since they’d first come in and lay down across it. “Why do I live here?” he asked faintly. He rattled around in the place. There were rooms he’d never even been in. (For instance: the attic. He’d never been in the attic of this place where he’d been living, for two-going-on-three years now. What was up there, anyway? ...Did he even _have_ an attic?) What did he need all this space for?

“The library’s nice,” Clark offered up, as a sort of balm.

“...Yes,” Lex allowed. He tilted his head back and considered. “But I could put a sleeping bag up on the landing above the door, and just live in there, in that one room. That room is bigger than most people’s houses.” For all that the mansion was crammed with furniture and other strange things, Lex himself didn’t have a lot of stuff of his own beyond clothing and books. And the staircases up to the small second level, to that private nook overlooking everything with its private bookcases, would be an ideal sleeping location -- he’d hear and see anybody trying to sneak up on him from there. Unlike the couches.

“A cot.”

Lex blinked and looked down at him. “What?”

“It’s all hardwood floors. You don’t want a sleeping bag; you want a cot.” Clark opened his eyes and frowned a little, somewhat-present, actually seeing the boring-looking, white-washed ceiling. “And a kitchen.”

Lex smiled.

“I have the fireplace,” Lex pointed out.

“...Laundry room?” Clark asked.

“Other side of the room, at the far end across from the fireplace,” Lex decided. He fully visualized the space. “Maybe put in some rugs to muffle the noise.” Then he just about laughed at himself. “And a bathroom.” Because an outhouse in Kansas would just be smelly and cold. (And only slightly less inconvenient than a shallow hole in the ground.)

“Dividing walls.”

Lex tilted his head. That would hide a bathroom, and work much better than rugs. And it would help keep his sleeping space warm, sealing off the room into sections. Though if they were going that far... “A real second floor. Lower ceiling.”

“Second floor _loft_ ,” Clark insisted, no qualms about sharing his fondness for wide open spaces.

“My own Fortress of Solitude,” Lex teased softly.

Clark closed his eyes and smiled. “You could use one.”

Lex smiled back.

\-----

Lex did not remodel the ancestral Luthor mansion.

What he did do was take Clark along house-hunting.

It was actually kind of… fun.

They went through three agents before they came across one who wasn’t offput by their lack of discussion, or comments, or any vocalized verbal response at all. They found that one quite by accident, one who was happy to fill their silence with a continual patter of words, like softly falling rain, without acknowledgment or censure to guide them.

They didn’t talk about it afterwards, either. They’d just sprawl out somewhere, just the two of them, in the too-big mansion, with all the folders and pictures strewn about them, and circle things, make notations, cross stuff out.

It took a while. There was no perfect place like home.

Lex found someplace that was close enough.

Clark did not move in.

But he did do sleepovers. Pete and Lex took turns.

\-----

Lex somehow managed to be at a farmer’s market on a Sunday afternoon without Clark around.

It was a very different experience without him.

In the course of his wanderings, he walked past the Kent’s produce stand.

He slipped a small wooden box out of his pocket and left it on the table as he walked by.

A hand snaked out and grabbed his wrist.

...Because of course it was never that easy, was it?

Lex stopped in place and looked up. Jonathan was holding onto him.

Jonathan frowned, leaned forward, and picked up the box with his free hand. He opened it to see the ‘moral’ compass inside.

Lex thought about saying, ‘It wasn’t very useful.’ He thought about saying, ‘I don’t need it.’

Jonathan looked up at him and asked him, “Why?”

Lex shrugged, and drew his hand away, out of Jonathan Kent’s grasp. “Why don’t you let Clark hold his little sister?”

It wasn’t a rhetorical question.

Jonathan didn’t answer it.

He just looked like he’d been punched in the gut, dismayed, and then drew himself up, downright furious.

“I think you need it more than I do,” Lex told him, and then he walked away, vanishing into the crowd.

A neat trick he’d picked up from Clark. Conversational judo that drew first blood, and how to disappear while seeming to stand still.

The latter was something Lex had wished Clark had never figured out how to learn.

“You’re a bad influence on him,” Pete muttered, as Lex caught up to him, as though Lex’s new learning in this area had gone the other way ‘round.

“So are you,” Lex replied, deftly changing the subject as he shoved his hands into his coat pockets while moving past him at a brisk pace. After all, the Ross family was doing its fair share of enabling Clark over the elder Kents, themselves.

Pete frowned at him, but caught up again quickly.

“Best two out of three?” Lex enquired.

“ _Fine_ ,” the Ross boy said sourly. He looked around. “Okay. How many stands selling tomatoes in _that_ row?” He pointed.

“Three.”

“Hah,” said Pete, and they both changed direction to go see.

Not that Lex was wrong, or anything. But sometimes it was nice to confirm something, to be proven right.

...Sometimes.

“Do _you_ know why Clark isn’t allowed to hold Claire?” Lex asked of Pete.

Pete grimaced and looked away.

Lex tilted his head slightly, and his eyes narrowed.

“Man, I’m just trying to stay out of it, y’know?” Pete told him, hunching his shoulders, not looking him in the eye. “But I think half of it’s Clark being Clark, anyway.”

Lex frowned.

\-----

“ _This_... could stand a lot more than a cot,” Lex told him, as he stood at Clark’s side in the caves. He’d walked up to him silently a few minutes ago.

“I don’t want to live down here,” Clark said, muted.

Lex turned to face him, full-on. He considered saying, ‘I can have these walls white-washed, you know.’ He considered waving a hand in front of his face. He considered telling him, ‘Go ahead and scream.’ He considered a lot of things.

Then he reconsidered, and moved forward to stand in front of him, blocking Clark’s view of the cave wall entirely.

Once he was sure he had Clark’s attention, by the way Clark blinked and looked down at him, Lex said, “With the amount of time you’re spending down here, I’m considering knocking out the rest of the ceiling and adding a loft.”

Clark didn’t say anything in reply. He just stared at Lex, who liked to think he was a damn sight more interesting to stare at than any old walls, no matter how well they had been painted up to look for future generations of native-born Kawatche descendants.

They walked out together.

\-----

“I think they’re happy,” Clark told him. They were lying on the grass in Lex’s backyard. He had a backyard. (With an honest-to-god knee-high white picket fence. ...Because Kansas. Lex wasn’t complaining.) It was a bit novel. ...It was also small.

Lex thought about saying, ‘If they are, they’re doing it wrong.’

Instead, he said, “Are you happy?”

Clark thought about it.

“Not really,” he said, staring up at the cloud-filled sky.

It was a definite improvement over walls. Sunny, not so much.

“...We should probably get inside,” Lex said, as the first raindrop hit him on the nose.

The next few came in short order, and they brought friends. Lots and lots of friends. It was more of a deluge, really.

Lex found himself laughing himself breathless, on his back porch, bent over shaking and soaking wet. His hands were braced on his knees.

He looked up at Clark.

Clark was staring down at him like he’d never seen him before.

“Don’t drown,” Lex told him, looking up at him from under wet lashes. He said it with a smile.

Clark just stood there and stared.

The rain kept falling.

\-----

 _One of these days, I’m going to figure out if I’ve ever hallucinated you or not,_ Lex thought to himself.

He was watching Clark. Clark was babysitting Pete’s little sister. They were in the living room of the Ross family household.

It was absolutely fascinating to watch. Lex hadn’t known that Clark was great with kids.

_So then, why…_

Lex shook himself.

They were sitting on the floor, pencils and papers strewn about. Clark was smiling, and Kathy was laughing over his utter lack of drawing skill.

Pete was rolling his eyes at their antics, and it sounded like Mr. and Mrs. Ross were fighting quietly in the kitchen. Lex was standing by the kitchen door, and he could hear them going at it faintly through the cracks.

But none of that mattered, because Clark was smiling.

Lex crossed his arms, leaned against the doorjamb of the closed frame, and thought about happy families.

He wasn’t sure he’d seen one yet.

 _Some things,_ he decided, _are a shared, active hallucination of our society._

\-----

‘Clark, you can’t be replaced, because you’re not replaceable.’

Lex wanted to say that, but Clark would tell him that that was a lie.

Lex didn’t know how to convince Clark that he would be telling the truth. So he didn’t say it. Any of it.

Clark _was_ irreplaceable to him.

“You’re going to get grass stains all over your back,” Clark told him.

“You made me buy _and wear_ flannel,” Lex noted dryly, calling him out on it.

“But you’re not wearing it right now,” Clark pointed out, as they lay on the grass and stared up at the clouds in the sky.

Lex smirked. “Too late for that now,” Lex told him, lazily stretching in place.

“Never,” Clark told him with a quiet conviction. “It’s never too late.”

“Is it?” Lex wondered out loud, as he pillowed his arms under his head, getting comfortable.

Clark fell silent.

‘...I thought we were talking about something else,’ Lex wanted to say.

It was sunny that day. There wasn’t any rain to save him.

\-----

“ _Lex_ ,” Clark said chidingly, or maybe just with a little (a lot) of exasperation. He was standing in the middle of the living room, arms crossed, feet planted, and was staring straight ahead, taking it all in with a dubious and almost challenging sort of air.

“Hm?” Lex queried, as he finished hanging up his coat by the door and turned to face him.

Clark turned his head and gave Lex a look, arms still crossed. “Your TV is as big as your living room wall.”

Well, technically it was his entertainment center that took up the whole wall; his flatscreen TV just took up the majority of _that_. “It fits.”

Clark did not look impressed by this answer, so Lex stifled a sigh and asked, “...And?”

Clark flung a hand at the wall. “Your living room is too small for it!”

“...And?”

Clark flung his hand out again, this time the gesture encompassing the surrounding furniture. “Your couch is only four feet away from the screen!”

“Yes,” Lex agreed simply, walking forward to stop next to Clark and lean his hip against the side of the couch. “And?” At Clark’s sharp look, he added, “It adds to the movie-watching experience. The screen fills almost as much of our vision as a screen in a theater would, this way.”

“There’s barely enough room to stretch out our legs!” Clark complained. “There’s not even enough room for a coffee table!”

Lex blinked.

He looked at the small, open and unfilled space between the front of the couch and the huge wall-covering entertainment center. Where there was no coffee table at all.

“Oh,” he said, a little blankly. “I knew I forgot something.”

It probably said something about their relationship, that this was the longest verbalized conversation that they’d had in a while, and that _this_ was the topic of it.

(Lex wasn’t entirely sure _what_ it said, mind you, just that it was something.)

Clark raised his hands and scrubbed at his face with his palms.

“You don’t have a coffee table anywhere in the house,” he heard Clark state, not really a question. It was a bit muffled with his hands covering his face like that.

“...We could go out and get one?” Lex offered. Movie night wouldn’t exactly be the same without a snack spread strewn out in front of them, and he didn’t want to just put it off. This was the first weekend he’d actually gotten things something like livable in the house-proper -- he wanted to celebrate the achievement. It had taken nearly a month to pass all the inspections, not counting the rewiring, plumbing fixes, and repaving of the driveway that had had to happen first.

It hadn’t stopped Lex from inviting Clark to come over and see the ongoing work in the meantime, to comment on it and the house in general, or just to hang out and eat Chinese on the floor of the kitchen together while making fun of the cabinetry -- which, admittedly, was pretty bad and required an update, though despite all that Lex secretly liked the kitschiness of the look, even if he would have been hard-put to explain exactly _why_. (...Maybe it reminded him a little of the white picket fence?)

They’d slept over on the floor in sleeping bags once or twice to-date -- with Clark grumbling some unspecified something under his breath about cots each time -- but generally, up until this point, Lex had driven them both back to the mansion to crash on the beds over there after each ‘visit’. But _this time_ was different. He’d finally been able to populate the house with **stuff** over the course of the past week, and he’d finished -- well, he’d almost _thought_ he had finished -- just that morning.

Kitchen supplies had been easy enough to get, to fill the shelves, drawers, and countertops up nicely, ordered online and delivered via mail to arrive on his doorstep oh-so-conveniently. Large electronics, such as refrigerators and microwaves and TVs and washer and dryer sets, had come much the same way via department store purchase -- also online, also delivered, just in the back door instead. Furniture, on the other hand, had been a different story.

It had taken him a while longer to find furniture he’d liked... and then a bit longer to wait for it to be shipped to him, because it had taken him just a little too long on that part of things, and Clark had caught him at it before he’d had a chance to really get started, let alone go out and acquire the items. Clark hadn’t made him cancel his internet orders for kitchenware and electronics -- already paid for and in the process of being shipped -- but Clark _had_ been a bit insistent that Lex at least do the furniture buying-and-receiving portion of his house-furnishing hunt somewhat more “normally,” and that had meant not only no expensive Metropolis suppliers and no special orders, but also _waiting_ for things to arrive in up to three-to-five business days, just like everybody else.

Which he’d done at Clark’s urging. And (impatiently) waited for. And eventually received and moved about and placed within said house and _finally_ gotten everything in-place and **finished**. ...Except for the now rather-glaring lack of a single very important piece of living room furniture. Sigh.

Clark dropped his hands and looked at him.

“Coffee tables aren’t _that_ big,” Lex noted. “Most people could fit one in the back of their car.” ...Right?

Not that one would fit in the back of one of Lex’s sportscars, which not only had a barely-existent trunk, but sometimes a nonexistent back seat entirely.

Clark sighed at him. “You just want an excuse to use the truck to haul things around,” he accused of him, with a definite amount of some level of exasperation with him on the point this time.

Not that Clark was wrong. Lex had _almost_ gotten to use it to cart some of the furniture to the house from one of those large warehouse stores -- he didn’t doubt that he would’ve found some very interesting things there! Unfortunately, because Clark had gotten to him first and talked him out of it, Lex had had to do most of his shopping through catalogs and word of mouth recommendations of farmer’s market booths to visit in town, instead. He hadn’t even gotten to do any showroom wanderings. And he’d really been looking forward to that.

...And yes, it was _the_ truck, **that** truck. The one Clark had given back, because his father had told him to do so. Lex had kept it, and when he’d been ostensibly moving clothing from the mansion to the house, he’d gotten disgusted with his lack of trunk- and back-seat- and other-seat-space in any of his sports cars and just tossed the boxes in the back of the truckbed for the interim, originally planning on getting everything into the garage in the first place, stacked up out of the way and off of the floor -- just in case someone thought to otherwise ‘helpfully’ unpack everything for him back into the mansion again, because all of the staff knew better than to remove anything ‘for’ him from the vehicles themselves -- and then he could make as many trips as needed over the course of however-long it took, possibly over several work days -- he could put a box or two in the car, go to work, and swing by the house on his way back to the mansion.

...Except all the clothing boxes had fit in the flatbed neatly. And he’d been on a roll, so he’d kept on going and packed up his personal collection of books and all his comic books, too. And then all his shoes and coats. And-and-and. And by the time he was done packing up everything he himself personally owned outright, he’d filled the back of the truck up to the brim. ...And it had seemed a waste and such a hassle to take _that_ many separate trips in one of his much-smaller cars when it was all _right there_ already.

So he’d just gotten in and driven the truck over to the house, and carried his boxes in all at once.

It had been very convenient.

And then he’d had no clothing in the mansion, which he hadn’t expected to be a problem for several weeks, at least.

And, since he was loathe to move anything _back_ , now that he’d already moved it all _out_ in the first place...

...he’d driven back to the mansion and stolen his bedframe and mattress. It was comfortable, he was used to it, and he doubted that anyone would miss it, really, besides him, and even though it technically wasn’t “his” because he hadn’t bought it, it also sort of _was_ , and he wanted it, and it was the one piece of furniture in the mansion that he felt that way about. (Well, except for the library, but that wasn’t a _furniture_ , that was a _room_.)

It had taken Lex a while to get all the bed pieces out, cart everything around, get it all in and up the stairs of the house, and set it all up, all by himself, but by god he had done it! So he’d been sleeping (alone, no Clark sleepovers yet) in the house for almost a week, now. His entire move had taken him only one day. And then, since he was already moved in and all, he’d needed to buy things for the rest of the rooms to make the place really livable, of course.

...And somewhere in there he’d hit a watershed moment, because after that, the idea of driving the truck around hadn’t exactly seemed inviolate anymore. He’d driven it to work an increasing number of times, and by this point had even gone to the store for groceries in it once or twice.

So, while Lex stood there and looked at Clark and tried not to bounce on his toes in excited suspense at the thought of actually having the _perfect_ excuse to go _out_ to go furniture shopping at an actual store -- _with Clark_ , and wouldn't _that_ be an experience? he stifled a grin -- since Clark had seemed to be under the impression that he hadn’t transported any furniture around in the back of the truck (yet) when the subject of furnishing the house had come up five days ago, he was fairly sure Clark didn’t know about the bed. He was _very_ sure that Clark had his suspicions on how all of his clothing had come to be in the house, though, and he absolutely _knew for certain_ that Clark knew that he was driving the truck around more and more frequently now (admittedly, at this point almost in exclusion) of any of his other cars, because it was parked out in the driveway right now.

But could Clark really blame him? The idea of driving the truck around did seem to fit well within the same realm of thought as the idea that he’d had about getting his own smaller house in town... and then followed through on.

“You really want to go out furniture shopping, don’t you,” Clark said.

“We’d have to put off movie night otherwise,” Lex pointed out with unassailable logic in mind to share. “Movie night just won’t be the same without a proper coffee table laid out in front of us.”

Clark gave him a long look.

Lex waited.

Clark sighed and dropped his arms. “...Where are we going?”

Lex grinned.

\-----

Lex had had an honest-to-god bound copy of the yellow pages sitting on his front stoop by the afternoon of the second day after he’d signed the paperwork and bought the place. He scrounged it up from where he’d secreted it in the kitchen next to the landline phone, and he and Clark sat down on the couch and looked up the nearest furniture stores.

Lex had already gotten furniture from some places in Smallville via the weekly farmer’s markets, so they skipped anyplace associated with those. Instead, they started with places closer than Metropolis, in Granville. They made up a list, grabbed a map, and headed out the door.

Lex and Clark walked around the small-ish showrooms of two different furniture stores -- one antique store, one of handmade to-order items that were customizeable -- and then they visited a larger outlet of put-it-together-yourself ‘less nice’ stuff. Then they visited a secondhand shop, which had Lex looking at Clark sideways, and about the time that Lex was reaching for the yellow pages again (he’d insisted on bringing it with them, just in case they needed it), Clark demanded that they visit a lumberyard.

“There are plenty of good furniture stores in Metropolis,” Lex argued. “I’m sure I can find something in one of the businesses there.”

“And I’m sure you can’t,” Clark said. “If you didn’t find anything you liked at that place you could order that custom stuff,” _which had had catalogs that you went through twice_ he didn’t need to say with anything more than a sideways look, “Then you won’t find anything you like at another one just like that in Metropolis.”

Lex looked away and pulled a face. Clark might be right, but he didn’t have to like it. And technically it was worse than that, because if he’d seen a coffee table he’d liked when he’d been originally looking at the furniture in all those other catalogs almost a week ago, he would’ve noticed it and gotten one then.

“But why a lumberyard?” Lex asked, not sure where Clark was going with this.

“Because that’s where you go to buy wood?” Clark said, somewhat rhetorically.

Lex frowned at him, then blinked. “...We’re going to _build_ a coffee table?”

“Make, technically,” Clark told him, like it was the easiest thing in the world.

“...Do you know how to make one?” Lex asked, because he sure didn’t.

“Yes,” Clark said simply.

Oh.

There was one slight problem, though. “Clark, I don’t own any power tools,” Lex informed him. _For that matter, now that I think about it…_ “I don’t own _any_ tools, at all.”

Clark turned and looked at him.

Lex looked at Clark.

They made a side trip to the local hardware store first.

In retrospect, Lex probably paid more for all the good lumber (somewhat cheap) and all the tools to work it (expensive by comparison) combined, than he would have spent if he’d simply drawn a table design he liked by hand and sent it to one of those specialty stores in Metropolis to make it for him.

But, when all was said and done, he had a coffee table all his own _made by Clark_ in his house, sitting smack-dab in the middle of his living room. So...

Lex was so busy marvelling over this fine thing that he didn’t really notice how Clark inobtrusively moved the couch back several feet further to make room for said coffee table in the middle of the room.

By the time he did notice, it was far too late to complain without coming across as difficult or bratty, and it looked like Clark was right about the living room being a bit small -- with the proper spacing in front of the TV, there was barely enough space behind the couch to walk by it from the front door to the doorway to the kitchen anymore, maybe three feet of clearance at most.

Lex came to the frowning realization that he was going to have to move the bookcases he had lined up along the staircase wall elsewhere, so that there’d be enough space to walk by while carrying something, like grocery bags, without having to carefully maneuver through the middle of the room, drat it. ...But that was later. Tonight they had other things to do, and they wouldn’t be moving around all that much once they’d settled in; they were just going to have to live with it for the night.

They were both pretty dusty with sawdust by then, so after cleaning up the porch and backyard where they’d done their work, they took turns in the in the downstairs bathroom showering and changing clothing (some things you just didn’t skimp on; for Lex, bathroom functionality was one of those things). And, after christening the new coffee table with good foodstuffs from the kitchen, their movie night -- which was originally going to be both an afternoon and evening of watching fun until things had been slightly derailed for a bit -- then commenced.

It was late by the time that they finished.

“I should go,” Clark said, leaning back and stretching as a precursor to getting up, while the credits rolled.

“You don’t have to,” Lex said, maybe a little too quickly. He didn’t let himself stop there, though, not now that he’d started. “I have a second bed. I mean, bedroom. The other room upstairs is also a bedroom. The couch folds out, too, but--” He cut himself off.

“Lex…”

“It could be your room,” Lex all-but-blurted out, then mentally winced as Clark’s face morphed into an expressionless mask. “If you want it. I-- you don’t have to?” he ended on nearly a plea, because Clark looked almost blank now, like he wasn’t even there, and Lex had no idea how to fix this, he just had the feeling he’d screwed up royally somehow and-- “You could take the bed in my room instead if you want it!” Maybe Clark just liked the beds in the rooms in the mansion better? Hell, he’d take Clark reacting badly to the existence of his oh-so-very out-of-place four-poster bed, in a house where it most certainly did not belong, over no response at all at this point.

“Your bed?” Clark asked, sounding startled, and maybe Clark really hadn’t known about his bed-stealing ways after all. Clark had gone through the catalogs with him, so he’d known how many beds Lex had ordered -- just the one, smaller, twin-sized one. He’d given Lex a hard look when he’d bought it, and warned that Lex probably shouldn’t be buying a mattress without lying down on it first to see what it felt like, to make sure that it was comfortable, first. ...So maybe he’d thought Lex had been buying it for himself, instead of as a spare guest room bed -- he knew how picky Lex was about his bedding, usually.

...But then, did that mean that Clark had thought that Lex really had only had the one bed in the house, and had just been offering him an empty room, to sleep on the floor? ...as a seemingly more-preferred option over his fold-out couch? (For what reason would anyone who was hosting someone they cared about possibly consider _that_ situation _preferable_?)

Lex stood up, and Clark followed him up the stairs to the second floor.

Lex showed him the ‘guest room’ first, with the bought-and-paid-for twin-sized bed within it. Bookshelf, nightstand, dresser, drapes. Dark wood, and bright painted colors. It was as cosy as he could possibly make it, for a guest room with nobody in it. Then he showed Clark his room.

Clark stared for a long time at Lex’s four-poster bed.

“...You took this from the mansion?” Clark asked after a while.

“It’s mine,” Lex said defensively, trying not to shift from side to side. He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Nobody else will use it. My father would have had it replaced anyway, even if I hadn’t taken it.” _...And I wanted it,_ went unsaid.

Clark stood there silently, still as a living statue, looking around with just his eyes.

Lex stayed where he was, watching Clark.

Clark closed his eyes for a moment.

Then he opened them and turned slightly towards Lex.

“Lex,” he said. “This isn’t the master bedroom.”

“I know.”

“You made the master bedroom into the guest bedroom?”

It wasn’t a question. Lex answered it anyway. “Yes.”

Clark looked a little stunned. He turned back to the king-sized bed in the middle of the room, missing only the canopy from it. “Why did you put this in here?” Before Lex could respond, Clark added, “There’s barely enough space for it.”

“It fits,” Lex protested mildly.

Clark gave him a look. “Lex, this is even more cramped than the living room. You have only one dresser in here, and barely enough room for a nightstand and a lamp.” He frowned, looking over at the rather small, very obviously _not_ -a-walk-in closet. “Where’s the rest of your clothing?”

“There’s a closet out in the hallway--”

“The _linen closet?_ ” Clark asked him incredulously.

Lex frowned at him. “No, the linen closet is… well, there are a lot of shelves behind the door in the bathroom,” Lex told him. It was more of a nook than a closet, but he was fairly sure that that was meant to be the real linen closet.

Clark tilted his head at him, and took a moment to leave the room and go check.

When he came back, he said, “And the rest of your clothing is where?”

“Down in the basement,” Lex told him. It wasn’t as though he needed all of it all the time; he certainly didn’t dress himself in tuxedos every other day.

“Down in the basement,” Clark echoed.

Lex decided that this was was a good opportunity to show off more of the house, right up until he took Clark down two flights of stairs and watched his best friend facepalm after he got a good look at the matching set of standing wardrobes lining the one wall.

“...It’s just the short wall,” Lex tried, starting to realize that maybe his living arrangement was a bit more nonstandard than he’d meant it to be. “It’s not like all of this would have fit in the closets in the master bedroom, either,” he pointed out.

“Lex.”

“Yes?”

“You need a bigger house,” Clark told him. And then he crossed his arms at him.

“I like my house,” Lex said belligerently, crossing his arms back.

Clark frowned at him.

Lex, being the houseowner and, thus, the bigger man here, dropped his arms and walked past Clark back up the stairs.

He was sitting on his bed in his perfectly fine bedroom with the lights off when Clark walked back in.

“Lex…” He sighed. “Why did you take this room?”

“The other room’s too big,” Lex told him.

 _No,_ Clark said without speaking, _It’s just the right size for this bed._

“What do you like about this room?” Clark asked instead.

Lex didn’t respond.

Clark came over and sat down next to him on the bed. And waited.

“...It reminds me of my room at Black Creek Ranch,” Lex told him. “But I really like this bed. I didn’t have one like this there.” _So now it’s perfect._ It had been all bunkbeds and extra cots in the other rooms, and while Lex had had a bunkbed in the main house there, in a cosy smaller room, he’d still been the odd one out, and had to sleep alone.

He saw Clark’s eyes light in understanding.

He also watched Clark wince slightly as he ran a hand through his hair, and blow out a breath.

“Lex, I… I can’t take the master bedroom,” Clark told him.

Lex knew that Clark wouldn’t want to take the smaller room away from him, knowing a little better now why Lex wanted it. So it was possible that that was the only reason Clark was saying what he had: politeness and consideration.

“You could take this bed in there instead if you want it,” Lex said, glancing away.

“Lex, I’m not stealing your bed,” Clark told him.

“You wouldn’t be; I’m offering,” Lex said quietly.

“That’s not…”

“It’s fine,” said Lex, flopping back onto the mattress, to stare over at Clark. “You could take this bed into the master bedroom, swap the beds so everything fits.”

“Lex, I don’t want to sleep in the master bedroom on this big bed!” Clark exclaimed, looking down at him.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s--”

Clark stopped.

Lex eyed him sidelong, under lazy eyelids.

“...too big?” he said, with a smile that was half-pained. Because it _was_ too big for just one person.

Clark expression went a little pained, then he blew out a sigh and collapsed back onto the bed, next to Lex.

He stared up at the ceiling, then closed his eyes.

Lex watched him breath in, and out again.

He took in another breath, and then said, “Lex.”

“Yes?” Lex turned his head to look over at Clark directly.

“I don’t ever end up sleeping in any of your guest bedrooms, anyway, do I?”

Lex mused over this, frowning.

Then he blinked once, and his expression cleared.

“No,” Lex said slowly. “You’re right. You don’t.” And he felt a little curl of warmth in his belly, because maybe, just maybe...

Clark nodded once, eyes still closed.

Then he opened them.

And he blinked, to see the little sparkles of light glint across the ceiling the hallway lighting.

“...Lex?” Clark said, tilting his head, puzzled.

Lex got a slow smile.

Then he flicked a hand out lazily to click a switch on his nightstand, his eyes never leaving Clark’s expression.

Clark started slightly when the mood lighting came on.

He looked puzzled when it slowly transitioned to the Christmas lights, strung up in the corners and along the sides of the wall, and slowly back again.

Lex watched Clark’s eyes light up in surprise for a moment, when the patterns of light and shadow on the ceiling glistened and spun.

“Lex…” Clark stared up at the ceiling in pure confusion. “Did you glue glitter to your ceiling?”

Lex smiled.

He slid his arms up and laced his fingers behind his head, pulled a leg up to the bed and tilted his knee side to side a bit.

“Beats a plain old boring white-washed ceiling any day, doesn’t it?” he said, looking up at the ceiling himself.

Clark turned his head to stare at Lex.

Then he turned his head back to the ceiling, to squint up at it in curiosity.

They could never get bored by it. The timing of the light-transitions was on a randomizer; so were the ‘blinking’ sets of which Christmas lights in each string turned on. Combined with the separately-chosen shifts in luminosity, it would never look the same way twice.

And even if they did get bored of it, well, Lex could always paint over it with another new layer of clear glitter-paint. Maybe he’d pick a different color of sparkles next time.

Clark let out a soft laugh, and dropped the backs of his hands over his eyes, covering them.

“You…”

Lex waited.

“...Did you do this in the other room?” Clark asked him.

“Not yet,” Lex said. _I wasn’t sure if you wanted it,_ remained unspoken.

Clark shook his head from side to side, eyes still covered. Then he dropped his hands to the sides of his head.

“You need a larger dresser in here,” Clark said.

“Okay,” said Lex.

“You’ll need to leave the canopy off the bed,” Clark said.

“I was having trouble getting the glitter and lights to stick to it, anyway,” Lex agreed.

Lex saw the sides of Clark’s lips quirk, as he held down another laugh.

“There isn’t enough space in the living room for the bookcases downstairs,” Clark told him. “You should move them into the other room up here, and turn it into a library.”

“Okay,” said Lex.

He held his breath, waiting.

Clark sat up. “I’m going to use the bathroom downstairs,” he told Lex. And then he got up and left.

Lex sat up abruptly, and almost followed him.

Instead, he forced himself not to. He got up, and used the upstairs bathroom instead, and kicked himself for even suggesting the couch before.

After he’d cleaned up, and changed, Lex went back to his bed and slide himself under the covers.

 _Did you really think that you were being given a cold and empty room as an insult,_ Lex wondered. _Did you believe, until you saw it, that all I was offering was a choice between that and going home, to a just-as-empty life that is all that your parents have been offering you lately?_

But he left the door open, hoping…

He was curled up on his side, almost about to turn off the night-lighting, when Clark came in.

Lex felt that little bit of warmth in his stomach glow, and grow larger, to rise up and fill his chest with light.

He watched Clark close the door to their bedroom, drop his duffle bag of spare clothes down next to the side of the bed, and then burrow down under the covers of their bed to face him.

They stared into each other’s eyes for a moment. Then Clark closed his eyes, and his breathing evened out.

 _Don’t worry,_ Lex thought quietly, as he reached out to turn the lights down low before snuggling in just a little closer. Because he was going to make sure to leave plenty of room in the new dresser for Clark to fill with whatever he wanted.

~*~*~*~*~*~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: ...Ayup.
> 
> (And yes, I do realize that Lex got the five stages of grief wrong. Are we much surprised? ;)


	8. Clark Kent is an only child, Part 2 (Jonathan Kent)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a continuation of Chapter 7, with a DC-mandate that states that Kal-El, when adopted by the childless Kents, is and remains an only child.
> 
> There are at least two sides to every story...
> 
> Character voices: Jonathan Kent

~*~*~*~*~*~

“Clark, what were you thinking!” Martha exclaimed. She was furious, and Jonathan felt that she had a right to be. Jonathan was angry, too. Clark had gone behind their backs and done something that had nearly gotten himself killed.

Clark had done something horribly dangerous -- shoving a hunk of pure green crystalline meteor rock into the spaceship with his **bare hands** \-- and Pete had helped him do it. He’d blown it up, which had been even more dangerous -- Clark had been lucky he hadn’t been killed by the alien device, especially when he’d been that close to meteor rock. And, on top of it all, he’d lied to them both.

That said, Jonathan had a feeling that now was not necessarily the best time to be yelling at Clark about it. He looked panicked enough as it was. Martha seemed mad enough for the both of them just then, and he wasn’t so sure that Clark was going to understand right now that Martha’s anger was really all that was keeping her fear at bay.

Which meant that, god help them, _he_ was going to have to be the one to try and play peacemaker, and calm everyone down. Clark was barely coherent at the moment, so Jonathan tried to start with his wife.

“Martha, we’re all alright, so maybe we should just--”

He winced as she rounded on him, and none of them got out of it unscathed that day.

\-----

By the time he got Martha calmed down, and then Clark finally talking again, so he was finally able to explain, they were all hurting. He hadn’t realized what his son had been threatened with; it left him pale just thinking about it. ...and then near-apoplectic when he thought about how the damned thing had _burned_ Clark, hurt his teenaged son for the sin of, apparently, loving his adoptive family too much to leave them. If he’d known… Jonathan would’ve gotten rid of it ages ago.

Martha had been upset afterwards that she’d taken her anger out on Clark, when he’d been just as scared as she’d been, and in direct physical danger where she hadn’t on top of that. But because she was still upset that Clark had been keeping secrets from her, she didn’t tell him that directly; she was stewing over it, as only a redhead would.

Jonathan found himself trying to deal with an upset and withdrawn Clark, and an upset and noncommunicative wife. It was not a comfortable position to be in, or a role he was very well suited for. Usually, Martha was the peacemaker, not him. Jonathan didn’t have much practice at it, and this time, he’d been thrown straight into the deep end of things.

What didn’t help was Luthor’s absence. Jonathan hadn’t realized how much Clark must have been talking to the young man, using him as a sounding board and someone to vent to, until he was gone. He was off on his honeymoon, and heaven knew if he’d speak to Clark at all when he got back -- Clark was supposed to have been his best man, and they’d all ended up missing Luthor’s wedding. But Luthor hadn’t seemed angry about it, just concerned, so Jonathan was hopeful.

Clark wasn’t talking to Pete after what had happened, either, because Pete was avoiding anything alien-related for the interim. The youngest Ross boy had gotten caught up in the crossfire between the Kent family members, and he hadn’t liked it. Martha had pronounced his helping Clark with the ship -- and helping Clark to keep what had been happening a secret from his own parents -- to have been horrible judgment, and rightly so. And after that, the two boys had been avoiding each other ever since -- it had been one thing for Pete to help the family; it was another to have tried to help his friend and to get yelled at by an adult for it, especially one in the know about Clark’s alienness.

Neither Chloe nor Lana were speaking to Clark for the moment, not that either of their presence would likely have helped matters. Chloe was apparently mad at Clark for ‘dating’ Lana, and had left for the city for the summer, while Lana… well, Martha had turned her away at the door when she’d shown up, telling her that Clark was grounded for the foreseeable future, and she’d gone home without a fight.

Neither of the two girls knew about Clark, and Jonathan doubted that that the introduction of more teenage hormones into the mix would’ve likely helped matters. But, he wasn’t so sure that trying to insulate Clark from outside immature teenaged influences and their highly-flawed judgment was necessarily worth isolating him from his friends completely; he wasn’t about to countermand his wife on the matter, though. ...Lex Luthor, on the other hand, wasn’t a teenaged friend of his son. He was an honest-to-god _adult_.

Jonathan was, god help him, counting the days until Luthor was back in the states.

A few days later, after the incident, Martha and Clark were finally starting to exchange words again, tentatively starting to heal, when it happened. They turned on the news and heard reports of the plane crash.

Luthor’s plane had never arrived at its scheduled destination. There were no known whereabouts of where it had gone down, other than the fact that it must have been over the ocean somewhere, and with each day that passed, less and less likelihood that there had been any survivors.

He’d thought Clark had been withdrawn before, but after his son had heard that...

It didn’t help that Jonathan felt uncharacteristically worried over Luthor’s fate, while his wife, after she’d calmed down, had almost seemed to half-blame him for what had happened with Clark. After all, if they hadn’t been at the wedding, they would have been at home, and if they’d been at home...

Clark had been outside, and she made a comment in passing to Jonathan in the farmhouse, how she felt guilty about not being there, how she felt about Luthor’s wedding having distracted them from what had been happening with their own son. And once she’d said one thing, it had opened the floodgates to more, to a horrible irrational anger and a terrible guilt. Jonathan had told her that it was understandable that she felt that way. He’d just been trying to help her feel better; she couldn’t help her feelings, and the stress was hardly good for either her or the baby.

...But it wasn’t good for Clark, either. Because that afternoon, Clark stopped talking to them both completely.

Looking back on it, Jonathan realized how what he’d said would have sounded to Clark, if they’d been overheard. How he would’ve sounded like he’d been down-talking Luthor once again, for something that had had absolutely nothing to do with him. Something that had only tangentially had something to do with his own father, Lionel Luthor, whom Pete had gotten the key from, that had been used to set the explosion off in the first place.

In his son’s ears, his mother would have sounded condemning, and his father overly judgemental. And when his son had come into the house later, and seen his mother in a better mood for having gotten everything off of her chest, for her husband having seemed to have agreed with her about how she’d felt about Lex’s “involvement”…

It was only later that night that Jonathan realized that Clark must’ve been listening, that he might have overheard them, maybe had even been quietly spying on them on purpose, waiting to hear what they were _really_ thinking about when they thought he wasn’t around.

But by then, it was too late. The damage had already been done.

\-----

Martha tried in the intervening weeks, she really did. She tried to engage with Clark again.

At first, she acted like everything was normal. She cheerfully showed him pictures of the ultrasounds of the baby. She asked him his opinion on clothing, the new crib, the paint colors. She teased him over how much he might like a little sister, or maybe a brother instead.

Clark wouldn’t look. He wouldn’t respond. And the moment Martha said the word ‘brother’, he got up and walked straight out of the house without looking back.

Martha’s positivity didn’t last long. She grew frustrated. Then angry.

She asked Clark for his opinion on baby names, once.

Clark responded with one word. “Alexander.”

And that was when she finally gave up.

“He’ll come around in his own time,” she told Jonathan, grim-faced. “We have to let him work through this. He’s in mourning. We can’t just talk him out of how he’s been feeling.”

But Jonathan wasn’t so sure.

\-----

There had been no word for months, and no closure. Jonathan was worried about his son, so he did the only thing he could do.

Jonathan took Clark to Lex’s funeral.

And as he stood there and watched Clark attend, watched him glare silently at the ex-wife who had somehow inexplicably survived when his son’s friend had not, Jonathan felt something else.

He saw a terrible anger flicker across Clark’s face for a moment, as his son watched the late Mrs. Helen Luthor watch dry-eyed as an empty coffin descended into the grave, and it scared him.

\-----

When Martha was rushed to the hospital two weeks early, when their child was born prematurely, Jonathan swore he nearly had a heart attack. The only reason he didn’t, was because Clark had been there.

Silent.

Strong.

...And just as worried as him.

They both nearly panicked when Martha collapsed, and the nurses bustled about her. They both breathed a sigh of relief when they heard the wailing cry of an infant, Jonathan’s baby girl, Clark’s little sister.

Martha cried when she realized that she couldn’t hold her own tiny daughter. Not yet. Not yet.

The hospital told them that they could visit her in the neonatal intensive care unit whenever they wanted -- that the more contact, the more talking to her, the better. They told them that it was alright to start getting attached, that she’d be better in the long run for it, not to wait to name her until they were sure she would survive.

They named her almost immediately.

Claire Alexander Kent.

\-----

Clark had turned and left the room almost immediately when the doctors had started discussing Claire’s care, what they could or could not do, what would help and what would not.

Jonathan found him later, sitting outside the hospital, back to the wall, with his knees pulled up to his chest.

“Clark,” he said, sighing, then sitting down next to him. “Did you hear what the doctors said?”

Clark rattled off a list of things, from Claire needing to stay in the isolette for at least a few days, to not picking up Claire until she was cleared for that by the nurses, to speaking softly to her or playing music for her, to sanitization and touching her _a lot_ \-- not stroking her, because preemie skin was so very delicate, but gentle and steady pressure -- around the legs or chest or head.

Jonathan was a little agog, and not only because it was the most Clark had said in three months. Half the things Clark had said, the doctors hadn’t even covered.

“Clark, how do you know all this?” Jonathan asked his son.

“I’ve been reading,” his son told him, curling in around his knees further.

Jonathan laid a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Clark, why don’t you come up and--”

“Do what?” Clark said, with a shaky laugh. “Sing to her?”

It was a running joke in the family that Clark had a terrible singing voice. Somehow, it didn’t seem so funny, now.

“Clark--”

“I can’t hold her,” Clark said, sounding miserable. “I can’t even touch her.”

“Clark, son, that isn’t true,” Jonathan interjected. “Of course you can touch her!”

“No, I can’t!” Clark yelled at him, then pulled in on himself abruptly.

“ _Clark._ ”

“--You remember why I couldn’t have a dog in elementary school?” Clark said, and he was shaking. “You remember how many strings I snapped on Mr. Jenkins’ guitar in middle school?”

“Clark, we’ve been over this,” Jonathan said, under his breath, glancing around. He and Clark had come up with lessons to help him with his strength, balloons and pencils and paper and soap bubbles. He put a hand on Clark’s shoulder.

Clark clenched his jaw and wrapped his arms around his knees even more tightly. “Do you remember the last time I touched someone in high school?” he gritted out.

Jonathan stopped short, a little taken aback. “No, son, I don’t…” he said, not sure what he was getting at.

“I’ve been breaking things again,” Clark told his father under his breath. “I get so angry. I think of Lex, and how he’s never coming back, and I just...” He shivered, and his fists clenched reflexively.

Jonathan sat very, very still.

“I’ve read about preemies,” Clark told him, so quietly he almost couldn’t hear him over the noise around them. “Normal--” He clicked his mouth shut and grimaced. ”Normally, people have to be so gentle with them... even most people have a hard time not hurting them.” He looked up at his father. “And you want _me_ to go up there and _touch_ her?! To-- to put pressure on her skin? When you don’t even trust me to pet a _dog?_ ”

“Clark, you’ll do just fine,” Jonathan said slowly, meeting his eyes and willing himself -- and his son -- to believe it.

“I’ll hurt her,” Clark said, so adamantly that it sent chills down Jonathan’s spine. Because Jonathan remembered the last time Clark had been so certain he’d hurt something, break something, and he knew from experience that it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Clark didn’t believe he could do it, if he didn’t trust himself to be able to have that level of control...

“You _can’t_ let me touch her,” Clark told him. “I’ll hurt her.”

The only way he’d really made any progress with Clark the first time he’d had this problem (when he’d been much, much younger, and a lot less stronger) had been to mentally trick him into it. But that had been with objects, not _people_. And if Clark was _that scared_ about hurting her...

Jonathan took in a deep breath.

He clapped Clark on the shoulder again, then wrapped his arm around him and pulled him closer.

“All right, Clark,” he told his son. “If you’re sure…”

“Yes,” said Clark.

Jonathan nodded once, then pulled away.

“...then you can be a good brother and talk to her now, so she gets to know you,” Jonathan told him. “And once she’s home, all normal-sized and loud and making trouble like any other kid, I expect to have some help in carrying her around and changing the diapers.”

Clark shrank inwards on himself.

But he didn’t say ‘no’.

“Clark?” he prompted.

“...okay...” he heard Clark say and, by god, Jonathan was going to hold him to it.

\-----

Jonathan and Martha spent almost every waking moment in the NICU with their daughter.

Clark, out of class for the summer and in self-exile, went back home to take care of the farm while they were away.

Two days in, Martha got to hold Claire for the first time.

Three days in, it was Jonathan’s turn.

Clark, on the other hand...

But when one of the nurses on the night shift approached them almost four days in, sleep-deprived and bleary, and asked them if they could have their son leave the book he was reading behind, because it soothed their daughter to sleep every single time and she would like to use it, Martha nearly broke down crying on the spot.

Clark had been coming in while they’d both been exhausted, apparently. While they’d both been asleep. He’d been coming in and reading to her, every night.

But he hadn’t touched Claire, not once.

...What made it worse, was that Martha was _relieved_. She herself was almost afraid to hold Claire. She’d almost told _Jonathan_ not to try and hold her. And when she was already that worried about either of _them_ possibly hurting their daughter… she didn’t want Clark holding Claire yet, almost as much as _Clark_ was afraid of what would happen if he tried to touch her.

Jonathan held onto that ‘yet’ like a lifeline.

\-----

Six days after she was born, Claire got a clean bill of health, and they all got to take her home.

Martha was treating her like she was spun glass, nervous and hovering again just like she’d been in those first few days in the NICU. Jonathan only realized after the fifth time she nearly didn’t pick Claire up when she’d started crying that his wife was being hesitant for a reason, from the way she always glanced around the room first before touching her: if something went wrong, they were without all the hospital equipment and trained personnel right there and standing by, ready to help, a reassuring and ever-present security blanket that they’d had at their disposal only a couple of hours before. And didn’t anymore. Now they were on their own.

Clark pretty much avoided the house almost entirely the first day. At first, Jonathan thought it was because he was just catching up on his chores, that he’d been distracted before ...or that maybe Clark was having a harder time watching Martha's hesitation than even he was. But the next day, Jonathan saw Clark head for the kitchen, see Martha and Claire…

...and freeze in place as soon as Martha saw him, looking pale and a bit wan, and practically freak out and run for the door when Claire started crying almost immediately thereafter.

Jonathan had looked at Martha, and followed after Clark.

“Clark, she’s okay,” Jonathan tried to tell his son. “They’re both okay. Claire is fine. She was only born a little bit premature.”

Clark shook his head, once, and continued mucking out the stable stalls in the barn, baling hay.

“You can talk to your mother, you know,” Jonathan tried.

Clark remained silent. He still wasn’t speaking to Martha -- not around her, and not in her presence. But he did talk to Jonathan sometimes, now. Once again.

Jonathan would take what he could get.

“You know,” Jonathan tried, “I could sure use some help with Claire, now.”

“Mom’s helping.” Clark said.

“You said you would help her with me,” Jonathan pushed, trying to get Clark to remember his promise.

“Sure,” Clark said neutrally. “Once she’s a kid.”

“What?” It took Jonathan a moment to remember, and he had to grab onto his patience with both hands and dig in. “Clark, you _know_ that’s not what I meant.”

Clark tossed another forkful of hay into the stall.

“I need you around, Clark,” Jonathan told his son. “I need you, your mother needs you.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Clark,” he said, starting to lose his patience with his son, “When I don’t need you anymore, believe me, I’ll tell you,” he said, voice practically dripping with irritation, because when in the hell would he not need his son?!

But the second the words left his mouth, Jonathan realized that he’d said exactly the wrong thing.

He watched Clark’s expression shut down.

“Clark.” Jonathan bit down on a curse. “You will always be my son. I will _never_ not need you.”

“Sure,” Clark said in response, but his eyes were dull, and his mind was elsewhere.

“--Claire needs you,” Jonathan tried, hoping he didn’t sound as desperate as he felt. “We need you here.”

“Fine,” Clark said. “Then I’ll stay as long as she needs me.” But it was clear from his dead tone that he thought it was just a formality, that he thought he was only waiting around until his parents came to his senses and realized that they didn’t need him, and that his sister didn’t either.

And in that moment Jonathan knew, with a feeling of dread in his gut, that his son had been hearing something very different than what he’d actually been trying to tell him, for a very long time now.

He watched Clark shove the pitchfork into a nearby bale, and turn to walk out of the barn.

\--To hell with this. The soft approach Martha always used wasn’t working for him. If it ever had. So he took the gloves off, instead.

“Clark, you’re not going to kill your little sister,” Jonathan told him, point-blank.

And that, finally, got a real response out of Clark. His son whirled on him like he’d just tried to stab him in the back.

“ _Of course I will!_ ” Clark yelled at him, eyes wide and face red.

“No, you _won’t_ ,” Jonathan contradicted him coldly. “Not on purpose, and not by accident. --It’s not going to happen, Clark,” Jonathan told him authoritatively, as his son shook his head furiously. “You just don’t have it in you.”

“The hell I don’t!” Clark spat out with a grating laugh. “I killed _him_ , didn’t I?”

And then Clark went pale, like he realized that he’d said too much.

From where Jonathan was standing, though, he hadn’t said _enough_.

“Killed who?” Jonathan demanded with a frown.

He watched Clark flinch and look away from him.

“ _Clark._ ”

“Do you remember the day when-- on… on Lex’s wedding day,” Clark said out of nowhere, almost choking on it, before he seemed to get ahold of himself, looking down at the floor. “--Do you remember how the truck died, and you had to walk home?”

Jonathan frowned. “Yes,” he said, searching for something somewhat neutral to say, to keep Clark talking. “Your mother wasn’t exactly pleased about that.”

“I know,” said Clark. He clenched his jaw, then unclenched it. Clenched his fists instead. “Did you ever wonder why?” he asked.

“...Why?” Jonathan echoed.

“Why the truck engine died,” Clark said. “Why--” he swallowed. “It-- it was the explosion,” Clark said, looking at anything but Jonathan just then. “It-- it sent out some kind of electromagnetic pulse,” Clark told him. “It screwed up the sparkplugs, the engine.” He paused. “The electronics.”

Jonathan frowned at him, took a step forwards.

“You were more than a mile away from the farm when it went off,” Clark told him, as Jonathan took another step towards him. “And it killed the engine.”

“Clark,” Jonathan said, raising a hand to put on Clark’s shoulder, but Clark shied away from him. He let his hand fall. “What does that have to do with anything?”

Clark took in a deep breath, almost spasmodically.

“I know exactly when I confronted the ship,” Clark said. “When I set the explosion off.” He looked like he was going to hold back something, before he seemed to change his mind and said, “I know when the EMP hit the truck, and how far out you were.” He swallowed. “When they said Lex was missing, I looked up the flight path,” he told his father. “They were almost directly overhead when the blast went off.”

Jonathan frowned. And then he started to get it.

“Clark, they went down over the ocean!” Jonathan protested. “That had nothing to do with you!”

Clark looked over at the wall of the barn grimly. “They were directly overhead,” he said. “They were under ten-thousand feet.” He took in a breath. “And the investigators said that the crash was probably because of a problem with the onboard computer systems. The electronics.”

“Clark--”

“Airplanes have a lot of redundancies,” Clark continued. “So it makes sense that things didn’t fail right away...”

He looked up at his father, stared him dead in the eye.

“I killed my best friend _by accident_ ,” Clark told his father coldly, with complete and utter certainty. “I killed Lex,” Clark said, his voice shaking, “and I’m _not_ going to kill Claire, too. _**Okay?**_ ”

Jonathan took in a deep breath, and had to come to the heartbreaking conclusion that he might never get his son back. That he’d let things fester under the surface for far too long. That his son already wasn’t listening to him anymore, and didn’t believe what he told him. That, if he couldn’t even convince Clark that he wouldn’t hurt Claire… that he hadn’t hurt Lex...

He’d never have a chance of convincing Clark of anything else.

“Okay, Clark,” Jonathan said. “Okay.”

\-----

Jonathan thought he’d been hallucinating from lack of sleep when he’d heard the familiar growl of an engine outside. He had Claire crying loudly right in his ear, so it wasn’t surprising that his brain was coughing up random noise to try and give his mind a little relief from the piercing screams.

Martha was doing something with the breast pump, and she looked tired as anything. 

Frankly, Jonathan was starting to wonder how anyone survived having an infant in the house for any significant period of time. He was also appreciating Clark having been a toddler when they’d adopted him a lot more.

Martha hadn’t responded to anything outside, so Jonathan thought he’d imagined it.

...Until he went outside, hours later, to get Clark for dinner, and saw the tire tracks.

\-----

Jonathan called the mansion.

The mansion staff picked up. And he’d been about to demand to speak to Helen, to read her the riot act, because she ought to know that driving one of Lex’s cars to the farm was adding insult to injury, and if she _didn’t_ , well...

But that all was pushed aside when the excited housestaff chattered at him jubilantly about Lex’s return, and how thank god Clark was with him, getting him to slow down and take care of himself and eat something, and--

Jonathan listened to them go at it, taking turns over the phone, and as he stood there, he felt like everything was at a remove. He faintly realized that he was in shock.

Lex Luthor… was alive?

Then he remembered to breathe, because...

\--Lex Luthor was _alive_. And if Luthor was alive, then Clark hadn’t, _couldn’t_ have killed him.

 _Oh, thank god,_ Jonathan said, slumping against the kitchen countertop and breathing out a faint sigh of relief.

He felt himself starting to smile.

Because everything was going to be all right.

He was going to get his son back.

\-----

Clark was back the next morning, having stayed overnight at the mansion, and Jonathan wasn’t _about_ to complain. Not after he saw Clark walking around the barn like he wasn’t half-dead and slowly bleeding his life out, for the first time in _months_.

“How was he?” Jonathan asked him.

“Like you care,” Clark muttered.

Jonathan stopped and reached for patience again.

“Of course I care about him, Clark,” he told his son.

Clark literally stopped in place, then whipped his head up towards him.

“You do not!” Clark protested, tightening his arms around the bag of seed for the chickens. “You’ve always hated him, and you think it’s his fault that you weren’t at the farm, that it’s because of the wedding you weren’t here when I set everything off!”

“Clark, I’m fully aware that you probably could have found a way to trick me and your mother into driving into town for some errand before setting off the explosion, instead,” Jonathan told his son dryly, crossing his arms.

He saw Clark’s eyes go wide.

“I’m your father, Clark,” he said. “I was a teenager once. And I’d like to think that I’m not all that stupid.”

Clark gave him a pained look, then turned his face away.

“Clark, I may be angry that your mother and I were off at Lex’s wedding instead of here with you, and I may be angry with you because you lied to us, went behind our backs to do something you knew was incredibly dangerous, and nearly got yourself killed,” Clark winced, “But I don’t blame Lex,” Jonathan told him, “and I don’t blame you. --I blame the damn ship,” he told his son.

But from the pinched, disbelieving, and almost belligerent look on Clark’s face, he could tell that he’d lost his son again.

They both jumped when the crying from the house started up again.

“You’ll get used to it,” Jonathan told him. “We all will. ...Eventually.”

“No, I won’t,” he heard his son mutter, rubbing at his temples.

“...Clark?”

Clark shook his head.

“Clark, what’s wrong.” Jonathan looked at his son carefully. “Tell me.”

Clark seemed to struggle with something internally for a moment, then he pulled in a breath.

“When she screams…” Clark stopped, then forced himself to start again. “It-- it hurts my ears, dad,” Clark said. “It’s-- When she cries, I--” He clenched his jaw. “I’ve been getting headaches,” Clark confessed, and he didn’t sound all that happy about admitting it.

Jonathan frowned. “Is that why you’ve been staying out in the barn so much?” he asked.

Clark nodded. “I-- I can at least sleep out here,” he said, but then he stopped. He looked like he’d been about to say something else.

“I don’t really like you out here all alone,” he told Clark. But then he hesitated, knowing how much sleep Clark usually needed to function properly. “But if it’s better for you out here…”

Clark nodded miserably.

Jonathan sighed.

“You need me to bring up a bed and extra sheets?” Jonathan asked him.

“--I’m fine,” Clark said quickly, and it was clear that he really didn’t want to talk about it further.

“All right then, son,” Jonathan told him. “All right.”

And when Clark started staying over at other people’s houses overnight without notice, Jonathan let it slide.

...It wasn’t until much later that Jonathan realized that Clark had gotten away with not telling him anything at all about Luthor.

\-----

When the school year started up again, Pete came around again more often, usually to pick Clark up for a visit that inevitably turned into an ‘impromptu’ sleepover.

This happened at least once or twice a week.

After the second week of this, Martha made comment to wanting Clark to stay for dinner that night, so that they could all eat together.

Clark, who had at least started speaking in his mother’s presence again, now that Lex was back, looked uneasy about it. Pete seemed up for it, though, since Claire wasn’t crying just then, and so they stayed.

Martha knew about how the crying had been giving Clark headaches -- Jonathan had told her about that. What he hadn’t told her about was Clark’s reasons for not wanting to pick up, or even touch, his baby sister.

Martha was happy to show Pete how to hold her, and was able to coax him into it, as Clark looked on.

When Martha tentatively tried to do the same thing to Clark, however, Clark apparently had decided that right then was the best time to give a full explanation as to why that would be such a terrible idea.

Up to and including how he apparently couldn’t feel anything he touched, so he had to be aware of literally each and every muscle in his body, his pose, and his posture, relative to each and every person in the room with him, at all times, or risk hurting someone.

He successfully convinced Martha that it was (still) too dangerous for him to pick up or hold his little baby sister.

‘Maybe when she’s a kid’ became the official family consensus.

It made Jonathan feel sick to his stomach. ...But what was he supposed to do? Insist that Clark try anyway, and risk both Claire’s young life and Clark’s sanity in the attempt? Clark would never forgive himself if he even _thought_ he might’ve hurt her. And Claire...

Pete, at least, looked about as uncomfortable about it as Jonathan felt.

Martha just came off as sad and sympathetic. And Jonathan didn’t want to think about how Clark might be reading those two emotions just then.

\-----

When Lex came by the booth at the farmer’s market, he dropped off the family heirloom, the compass Jonathan had gifted to him at the wedding, like it meant nothing to him.

When Lex asked him why Clark wasn’t allowed to hold his baby sister, Jonathan nearly strangled him on the spot. When Jonathan couldn’t answer him -- how could he? -- and how _dare_ he? -- and _Lex Luthor_ then informed him that he thought Jonathan needed a moral compass more than he did, Jonathan had been left stunned, staring after Lex as he turned on his heel and walked away.

Insult, and injury, and Jonathan honestly couldn’t say he didn’t deserve it. He’d made so many mistakes with his son, trying to balance what Martha and Claire and Clark all needed, and the only reason he’d been able to make any progress with Clark lately at all was, he was certain, only because Lex had turned out to still be alive, after all. And by all accounts he hadn’t been angry with Clark for failing his best man duties, either, for standing him up at his second wedding.

It didn’t make Jonathan want to strangle Lionel’s son any less, though.

\--Maybe even moreso, for all that Jonathan was afraid that he might be at least a little bit right.

\-----

When Clark started staying over at other people’s houses at least four or five nights a week, instead of sleeping in the barn, Jonathan didn’t say anything. Martha was starting to give him long looks, though.

When it got to be five and then six times a week, and the sight of an overnight bag a common occurrence by the front door, Martha commented on it. Jonathan talked her down from confronting Clark on it, though, under the pretext that their son was already stressed enough as it was, and that he really needed his sleep to keep his grades up in school.

When Jonathan ran into Pete’s mother at the supermarket, later, he started to thank her for taking care of his son. And then he realized in the course of the conversation that followed, that Clark wasn’t spending every one of those nights over at Pete’s house, maybe not even half…

That was when Jonathan started making discreet inquiries in town.

That was when he discovered that Lex Luthor had bought a house not a five-minute walk from the high school, in downtown suburbia.

He didn’t know what to think.

\-----

His family was slowly tearing apart on his watch, and he’d been blind to almost all of the cracks.

He hadn’t noticed until recently that Clark hadn’t using his abilities around the farm anymore, but in retrospect Clark had been doing it for awhile. He’d come home each day from school and gone straight to his chores, then disappeared to someone else’s house after dinner, and he never seemed to spend much time in his Fortress in the barn anymore in-between. Everything had been taking him three times as long.

When Jonathan finally realized what was going on, and confronted Clark about it, Clark had simply shrugged and said, “Why wouldn’t I be hiding my abilities from Claire?”

Jonathan had been flabbergasted. “Clark, she’s only a few months old!”

Clark then patiently explained to him how babies could start making and repeating sounds and words as early as four months old, how they usually started to use them on purpose at one year old, and could generally understand more than they can say at one-and-a-half. That they could start actually being able to communicate with other adults between two and three years old. That they could start telling adults what happened, if they saw something out of the ordinary happen when the adult was out of the room, as early as three or four years old.

That most kids -- _human_ kids -- were only able to start telling plausible, consistent lies, lies that adults would actually believe, around the ages of seven or eight.

That, in other words, it likely wouldn’t be safe for him to do anything around Claire until she was at least eight years old. Until she learned to lie effectively enough to be able to cover for him, and to know better than to tell anyone what she knew.

The idea of Clark effectively forcing himself to not be… himself… for _eight years_ made Jonathan feel more than a little sick to his stomach. And the way Clark was talking about trying to figure out whether she’d be ready and willing to lie for him, once she turned eight years old...

“Do you _really_ think it’ll be safe to tell her?” Clark asked him, straight-out.

“Clark, she’s family,” Jonathan protested. “Of course we’re going to tell her!”

“You didn’t tell the Clarks what I could do,” Clark pointed out to him. “You didn’t even tell _me_ I was an alien until I was fifteen.”

...And from the way Clark was talking about it, it looked like he was strongly considering the possibility of _never_ telling Claire about his birth origins. Of maybe even never letting her know what all he could do, that he was capable of.

It was about that point that Jonathan’s stomach fell to his knees. Because he finally realized how seriously Clark had been taking everything, right from the start.

From the moment he knew that his mother was pregnant, he’d known that there would be a problem. Him.

And his secret.

While Jonathan had been preoccupied with celebrating his wife’s pregnancy, and getting ‘first baby’ jitters, Clark had been doing research. He’d read up on how to take care of a human baby in order to be prepared; he’d thought about what would happen at every stage of the child’s development; and he’d figured out exactly what needed to be done to safeguard his secret.

For the foreseeable future, there was going to be two families of Kents. Jonathan and Martha and Claire and Clark, and Jonathan and Martha and… Kal-El.

Except ‘Kal-El’ didn’t, and couldn’t, really exist. So it was Clark, who happened to be an alien and felt comfortable letting loose at home sometimes and around Pete; and ‘Clark’, who went to school and kept under the radar and was friends with a few other people in town... and didn’t exactly exist. The ‘Clark’ the world saw was mostly an ever-evolving disguise full of ongoing lies that kept Clark safe. It wasn’t completely him; Jonathan knew that. (Hell, he could tell with his back turned which group of people Clark was talking to, simply by the shift in Clark’s tone of voice alone, that happened when he was talking with anyone who wasn’t in the know.)

(...Except for Lex Luthor, who Jonathan had only ever been able to identify as a non-Kent by the sharp uptick in the presence of suppressed _guilt_ in Clark’s voice, and even then it was only fifty-fifty. Was it any wonder that being in the presence of that 20-something-year-old generally made the hair on the back of Jonathan’s neck stand on end, when Clark treated him that way?)

So, what that meant was that, for the foreseeable future, there was going to be Jonathan and Martha and Claire… and ‘Clark’. And then _Clark_. **Not** Clark and Jonathan and Martha. Because him and his wife would be pretty preoccupied with the new baby, and then toddler, in the family, for the next several years, at least, at home, and it wouldn’t be safe for Clark to be himself around the farm with them.

Clark had realized from the start that he was going to have to separate himself, to at least some extent.

So why hadn’t Jonathan realized this? Why hadn’t _Martha?_

...What were they going to do?

\-----

Clark was on an overnight field trip for school, so it was as good a time for an ambush as any.

He knocked on the front door of the house at 7 o’clock at night, and was greeted by the sight of a puzzled-looking Lex Luthor opening the door.

...who then turned about as white as a sheet, because apparently no-one had ever explained to him what a peephole was for.

The man recovered himself quickly, though -- Jonathan gave him that.

“Mr. Kent,” Lex Luthor said almost icily, drawing himself up. “Can I help you with something?”

Jonathan ignored the aggressive, and almost derogatory, tone of voice that Luthor’s words had been delivered to him in.

Instead he looked down his nose at Lex, crossed his arms, and…

“Actually, yes. You can,” Jonathan told him with a smile, before turning around and walking away, back towards the truck.

The dumbfounded look Luthor had gotten had been just about priceless, and well-worth his keeping his temper -- something he’d gotten a lot more practice at over the last several months.

“You coming?” Jonathan called over his shoulder, and he got up into the cab and settled himself into the driver’s seat, only a few seconds before Lex pulled open the door-opposite and started shoving himself up into the passenger’s side seat.

Jonathan clicked on his seatbelt and started the engine.

He pulled out into the street so hard that Luthor nearly fumbled getting his own seat belt in.

He got stared at, and couldn’t help but feel a little smug. As if this little Luthor was the only person to ever peel out of a parking space or drive over the speed limit before. Hah.

“Should I ask you to ‘drive slower’?” Lex murmured to himself from the passenger’s seat, but certainly loud enough to hear.

Jonathan accelerated around a corner.

“Funny,” he told the Luthor boy who drove around sports cars. “I’d thought you’d appreciate a little speed.”

Soon enough, he pulled onto a back road and took another turn, until they left the paved roads behind.

By the time Jonathan stopped the truck a couple minutes later, they were practically surrounded by trees.

“Out,” Jonathan told him, as he pulled the keys from the ignition, shoved in the parking brake, and popped open his own door.

Luthor didn’t even hesitate to do the same, and it almost made Jonathan want to laugh, how the young man kept carrying on like he knew exactly what was happening, like he ‘ _knew_ ’ he was perfectly in-control of the situation.

He supposed he didn’t really have to wonder anymore how the boy kept getting himself into so much trouble.

Jonathan stripped off his seatbelt and stepped down out of the cab. He grabbed what he needed out from behind the front seats and pulled it down to his side, before slamming the cab door shut.

“You know something, Luthor?” Jonathan said casually, as he circled around the front of the truck, as Luthor slammed his own door shut and turned to face him. “You really don’t ask enough of the right questions.”

He saw Luthor’s eyes widen as he brought the rifle up to chest height, aiming it right at him.

“You might want to work on that,” Jonathan told him, as Lex Luthor stood there, standing and staring down the barrel of the gun.

“You can’t be serious,” Luthor said slowly.

“Sure I am,” Jonathan told him conversationally. “You got in a truck with someone you barely know, without asking where you were going, what they were doing, or why they wanted you to come with.” He casually worked the lever to chamber a round, never taking his eyes off him. Lex’s eyes went a little wider. “Sounds like something you should work on, to me.”

Lex slowly raised his hands.

“Stop that.”

Lex hesitated, then lowered them again.

“You aren’t really going to shoot me,” Lex said. But he carefully kept his hands at his sides, and he didn’t sound very sure.

He also kept watching the gun.

“Clark wouldn’t be very happy with you if you did,” Lex added.

“Neither would I,” Jonathan admitted, keeping the gun trained on him.

Lex looked up at him.

“You didn’t try to kill Nixon,” Lex said slowly.

“That’s true,” Jonathan admitted.

“But I did,” Lex added, in the same tone of voice as before.

“You did,” Jonathan noted. “And I thanked you for it.”

Lex grew quiet.

“Is this some kind of test?” Lex asked, starting to sound a little agitated.

“Yes,” Jonathan said, and he watched Lex go expressionless.

Well. Now that he had Luthor’s attention...

“What if I don’t want to be tested,” Lionel Luthor’s son asked him, with all emotion suppressed from his tone.

Jonathan shifted his shoulders casually. “Then we get back in the truck, I drive you back home, and we never talk about this again.”

Lex stared at him for a long time.

“...What did you need my help with?” Lex asked him, after a long while.

Jonathan smiled.

“Let’s go sit down,” Jonathan said, gesturing off to the side, to the left of Lex, with one hand.

Lex turned around slowly, and cast him a look over one shoulder, before slowly moving off, towards the woods.

Jonathan followed, still holding the gun on him.

The trees were a good distance apart, and it didn’t take more than a minute before they hit a small clearing, an old firepit with stumps around it.

Lex and Jonathan sat down at opposite sides from each other, and Jonathan laid the rifle across his knees, holding it with his right hand, the barrel pointed away from Lex.

“...Do you really need that rifle?” Lex asked him, as he shifted in place slightly on the stump.

“Yes.”

“What do you need it for?” Lex asked him, eyeing it.

“Intimidation,” Jonathan said, drumming the fingers of his left hand out the barrel of the gun, once.

Lex went still, staring at the motion.

“Ah,” said the young Luthor tonelessly. “I see.”

Jonathan gave him an ‘oh, do you?” raised-eyebrow look.

Lex looked up at him again. He wetted his lips almost nervously. “...I assume that this is about--”

“--Do you know why I didn’t try and kill Nixon?” Jonathan interrupted him.

Lex stopped, startled, then opened his mouth to respond. Then stopped again and closed it.

“No,” Lex said finally. “I don’t.”

“I didn’t try and kill Nixon,” Jonathan began, “because I was trying to set a good example for Clark.”

Lex’s eyes narrowed. “Letting someone kill you because you refused to defend yourself properly is a good example for Clark to follow?” he said, with a very faint sneer in his tone.

“No,” said Jonathan, with a snort. “Not teaching my son that killing your problems will solve everything is a good example.”

Lex stared at him.

“Tonight,” Jonathan told him, “is not a night for masks.”

Lex got a slight frown for a moment, though he smoothed it away quickly.

“What,” Jonathan began, “has Clark told you about his little sister?”

Lex pulled in a slight breath before he was able to halt his own reaction. “That he isn’t allowed to hold her.”

Uh-huh. “And?”

“And that he doesn’t know what she’s like.”

Of course not; she was barely a few months old. “And? What else has he told you?”

“He told me she was born prematurely.”

“She was, by about two weeks,” Jonathan confirmed. “Anything else?”

“...He’s told me her name.”

Jonathan snorted. Not with that reaction, he hadn’t. “Has he.”

Lex’s eyes narrowed.

“Claire Kent,” Lex told him, almost primly.

That’s what he’d thought.

“Claire _Alexander_ Kent,” Jonathan informed him, dryly.

Lex stared at him.

“...You mean Alexandria,” Lex said, sounding a little shell-shocked, still staring. “...Or Alexandra.”

“No,” said Jonathan patiently. “It’s Alexander.”

“...That is a _horrible_ name for a girl,” Lex said, after a long while.

“Is it?” Jonathan said, sitting back and feeling almost amused.

Lex all but glared at him.

“She’s going to get teased in school,” Lex said insistently, with an undercurrent of anger.

“She was born prematurely,” Jonathan reminded the young man sitting across from him, “And we wanted to pick the name of a survivor.”

Lex’s eyes narrowed. “You named her before you knew I was still alive,” he protested.

“Yes, but you’d survived a hell of a lot else before that that should’ve killed you,” Jonathan pointed out.

“--And?”

Jonathan smiled. “And when we’d asked Clark’s opinion on names six weeks earlier, he said ‘Alexander’.”

Lex clenched his jaw and looked away.

“...Did you even know if it was going to be a boy or a girl?” Lex asked him.

“No,” Jonathan admitted easily enough. “Martha wanted it to be a surprise.”

“And you picked Alexander anyway.”

“I didn’t hear Clark complain about it in the delivery room,” Jonathan put out there easily.

Lex’s eyes flicked back up to meet his.

“You’re messing with me,” Lex said.

“You can ask Clark about it when he’s back from his school trip.”

Lex frowned at him, like he was trying to gauge him.

_Good luck, son._

“What did happen with the plane?” Jonathan asked him.

Lex blinked, taken aback. “What?”

“The plane,” Jonathan said. “It crashed, right?”

Lex stared at him.

“Clark didn’t--?” He stopped. “Didn’t you hear about it on the news?”

“We heard that they thought that your plane crashed into the ocean, but no-one was sure what had happened,” said Jonathan. He left out all the additional unconfirmed rumors that had been circulating about Helen, after she’d shown back up in town again without her husband in tow. “The first I realized you were alive was after you’d driven off with my son, and I only heard about it from calling your people up at the mansion, to hear he was up there with you.”

Lex stared at him.

“We’ve had a newborn baby girl keeping us up at all hours of the night, taking up almost all of our time and keeping me and my wife at home,” Jonathan reminded him. “So, what did happen?” Jonathan asked.

Luthor eyed him a little sidelong. Then he sighed, ran a hand over his head, and slumped forward a little, putting his elbows on his knees.

“I fell asleep on the plane,” he told Jonathan. “When I woke up… everyone was gone.”

Jonathan frowned. “Gone?”

“Helen wasn’t there,” Lex said, his eyes tracking sideways slightly. “The pilots weren’t there. The altitude was dropping. All the air masks had fallen.”

“You jumped out?” Jonathan asked.

Lex let out a startled laugh.

“No,” he said. “There weren’t any parachutes left.”

“Then how did you get out?” Jonathan asked, shifting in place.

Lex looked up at him with a rueful smile. “I didn’t.”

Jonathan knew he had a confused look on his face.

“I remember running towards the back of the plane,” Lex told him. “I got into the bedroom in the very back. I remember the plane shuddering under my feet when it hit the water. I remember slamming the door shut, for all the good that did in trying to keep the water out. And then the water hit me and I blacked out.”

Jonathan sat back in place. ...Well, _that_ was horrifying. “So they all bailed out on you, and just left you there?”

“Apparently so,” said Lex, leaning back and a little more upright again.

Jonathan mused over this for a bit. He supposed that was more than enough grounds for wanting a divorce. ...It also said a lot more about the lady-doctor than he liked to think about, with what she knew, or suspected, having gotten a good look at Clark’s blood.

“Do you know what was wrong with the plane?” he asked Lex after a while. “Was it an electrical problem?”

Lex let out a startled laugh. “If by an ‘electrical problem’ you mean that it looked like someone had ripped half the control systems out of the walls of the cockpit, then yes, there was an electrical problem,” Lex told him, with a gallows-humor sort-of amusement.

Jonathan pulled in a breath. That wasn’t good.

“Did you ever figure out what happened?” he asked Lex.

Lex gave him a tired smile. “No,” Lex told him. “I have no idea how I survived.” He gave out a soft laugh, and ran a hand over his head again. “All I remember after that was waking up on the island.”

 _...Island?_ It took Jonathan a moment.

“Luthor,” he said with some exasperation, “I was asking if you knew what happened with the plane. How it got that way, to end up crashing.” It was kind of obvious that he’d somehow survived, even if he didn’t remember doing it. The other open question, Jonathan felt, was the more worrying one, because it sure as hell didn’t sound like an accident.

Lex blinked at him.

“I, ah…” It took Lex a moment. “No…” Lex said finally.

Jonathan let out a breath of exasperation and rubbed a hand over his face. “Well, don’t you think you ought to find out?” he asked the man in front of him, who clearly hadn’t even done the least bit of digging into things yet.

Lex stared at him for a moment.

Then he began to frown furiously.

“I’ve been busy with Clark,” he was told.

“Luthor--” What the hell was he going to do with the man? “For _god’s_ sake, look into it.” The whole damn thing sounded like some kind of sabotage-setup, right out of a murder-mystery novel. And lord knew what would happen to Lex, the next time he got on a plane. The last thing anyone would need was a repeat of that.

Clark would probably go ape-shit, as a start.

Speaking of which. “--You should tell Clark about this,” he told Lex.

Lex blinked at him. “What?”

“Tell Clark about this. About what happened,” Jonathan elaborated. “All of it.”

Lex frowned at him. “Why?”

 _Because maybe then he’ll stop thinking that what happened to you was his fault,_ Jonathan thought. And maybe it’d do them all some real good. In retrospect, it wasn’t surprising that Clark didn’t seem to have been talking much with Luthor, either -- he probably felt guilty as hell about the plane crash still, despite the fact that Lex had somehow managed to survive it. Lex was likely the only one who could convince Clark otherwise -- that it really hadn’t been his fault -- and if he did, then maybe it would lighten Clark’s guilt, and he would start talking more with everyone again.

“If you explain to him what happened -- tell him everything you told me, the same way you told it to me -- I think he’ll jump at the chance to help you with it, as a start,” Jonathan informed him.

Lex looked at him dubiously.

“Have you told him about it already?” Jonathan asked, knowing the answer was no.

“No,” said Lex.

“Has he asked you about it?” Jonathan asked, also knowing that the answer was no.

“Yes,” said Lex.

 _You little ass…_ Jonathan slid his hand over the rifle barrel.

“No, he hasn’t,” he informed Luthor flatly in warning tones, eyeing him.

Lex’s lip curled up at one corner.

“And how would you know?” Lex all-but-accused of him. “It not like you two talk to each other anymore.”

Jonathan couldn’t help it. He sighed and shook his head.

“...Luthor, if that’s your idea of lying, then we’re going to have to work on that,” Jonathan told him tiredly, settling back on his tree stump.

Lex stared at him.

“Did Clark tell you that we don’t talk?” Jonathan said mildly, meeting Lex’s eyes.

Lex looked a little taken aback, then he hesitated.

_Yeah, didn’t think so._

“Clark hasn’t been talking much lately,” Jonathan told him. “To _anyone_.” He supposed Luthor must have noticed that -- and Jonathan had now just confirmed from talking with him that Clark hadn’t been talking much in Lex’s presence, either. “But just because Clark hasn’t been talking as much as he used to, doesn’t mean that we aren’t talking with each other at all.”

Lex grimaced and looked away.

“The time when he wasn’t talking to anyone anymore,” Jonathan informed him, “was when he thought you were dead.”

Lex’s eyes snapped back to him.

“What?”

“Clark pretty much stopped talking to everyone after there was word that your plane had crashed and that you’d died,” Jonathan told him. He leaned forward a little and made eye contact. “I’d appreciate it if that didn’t become a problem again.”

Jonathan held Lex’s eyes for a while, then sat back on his tree stump again.

“...You’re really not going to shoot me,” Lex said.

“Not if I don’t have to,” Jonathan confirmed.

The young Luthor paused for a moment.

“Does that mean I passed the test?” Lex asked him.

Jonathan let out a laugh. “You think that was a test?” He shook his head. “Luthor, we haven’t even gotten started yet.”

Luthor’s face fell.

Then the boy got angry.

“Then what the hell was all this, then!” he demanded, shooting to his feet.

Jonathan tilted his head at him, and drummed his fingers along the barrel of the rifle again. “It was me, making sure you haven’t done anything stupid to my son, yet.”

Lex frowned down at him, speechless.

Jonathan got up and dusted off the back of his jeans, the barrel of the gun pointed downwards at the ground. “Good talk,” he told Luthor, before turning around and starting to walk away, back to the truck.

“What?” he heard Luthor say, sounding startled. “...That’s it?!” he heard, with a little more anger.

“This time, sure,” Jonathan said, stopping and looking over his shoulder, as he raised up and tapped the barrel of the rifle against his shoulder.

“You said you needed my help!” Lex frowned at him.

“And you are helping.” He smiled slightly down at the young man. “You answered a couple of questions for me, and you’re going to tell Clark about what happened with the plane.”

Lex stared at him, and Jonathan held his gaze until he blinked, looking only a little taken aback. Then Jonathan turned back around and headed back to the truck.

“--When do _I_ get to ask _you_ questions?” he heard Lex call out at him.

“You did ask some,” Jonathan called back over his shoulder.

He heard Lex snarl something under his breath, then rapid footsteps behind him as Lex caught up.

“I suppose that you’d be about as open as Clark ever is about anything if I did ask you something, then,” Luthor stated dourly. It wasn’t a question, but...

“You ask me something in private that I don’t want to tell, I’ll cheerfully tell you to go to hell,” Jonathan informed him. “Clark’s got a bit more manners.”

“Lying is mannerly?” Lex shot back in pure frustration.

“Depends on your point of view.”

“My point of view?” Luthor repeated incredulously.

“Or Clark’s,” Jonathan noted. “You ask something that Clark doesn’t feel comfortable answering, but that he knows you want an answer to; what do you expect him to do? Ignore you?” Jonathan responded simply.

Lex trudged along beside him, with a furious scowl on his face. Even his footsteps sounded a bit angry.

Angry footsteps became merely annoyed… then just...

“Why the hell did we have to come all the way out here?” he heard Luthor complain. “Couldn’t we have talked at my house?”

Jonathan looked at him sideways. “You’ve got neighbors too close-in. I didn’t want to risk anyone overhearing us.”

“ _Your_ farm’s a mile away from your nearest neighbors, we didn’t have to come all the way out here,” Lex said darkly.

Jonathan smiled, shifting the rifle to hold it across the back of his shoulders.

“Claire’s a bit loud these days, and Clark’s usually around within earshot. I thought I’d start by setting a good precedent,” he told Luthor not-quite-cheerfully.

“A good--” He heard Luthor pull in a short breath.

“You want to meet with me… behind Clark’s-- and your _wife’s_ back?” he heard Lex say in rising tones.

“No,” Jonathan said simply, lying through his smile. “Not really. Just without them around.”

They reached the truck.

“You mean with them out of the way,” Luthor huffed out at him, looking at the rifle he was carrying.

_Well, something like that._

“Problem?” Jonathan asked.

“Yes,” said Lex. “I don’t want to keep secrets from Clark. --And do you really need that for intimidation?” he added, glaring down at the rifle that wasn’t pointed at him anymore. Currently.

“Yes, I do need it.”

“You’re intimidating enough without it,” Lex told him flatly.

“No, I’m not.”

Lex pulled in a breath through his nose and looked like he was trying to hold back a face.

Jonathan went around the truck to the driver’s side, and opened up the door. Lex opened up his.

“I don’t want to keep secrets from Clark,” Lex repeated.

“But you keep secrets from him anyway,” Jonathan noted easily enough, as he hefted the rifle.

That got him a narrow-eyed glare.

“Let me _rephase_ ,” Lex said, with ice in his tone and a raging fire underneath. “I _will not_ keep this -- keep these meetings -- _any_ meetings with you -- secret from Clark!”

“Fine,” Jonathan shrugged off, as he shoved the family rifle in back behind the seats again.

“--‘Fine’?”

“You go right on ahead and do that,” Jonathan told him, as he pulled himself up into the truck.

“Don’t think that I won’t,” Lex told him in almost-threatening tones, from where he was still standing on the ground, outside of the truck. Like he was ‘calling his bluff’.

“Oh?” Jonathan said, slamming his door shut, then turning and giving him a grin. “Maybe I’m counting on it.”

Because with any luck, after his son had heard about how he’d threatened his best friend with the family rifle, Clark would storm in on him in the barn again and lose his temper. And yell at him angrily.

And maybe let something else that was really important slip, like he had the last time he’d gotten openly angry and blown up at him.

And if Clark _didn’t_ get angry about it... well, that’d tell Jonathan something, too. --Like not to waste his time with Luthor anymore.

“You getting in anytime soon?” Jonathan asked rhetorically. “Or do you want to walk back?” he added as Lex stood there and seemed to balk. Frankly, he was almost curious as to whether Luthor’s pride was rigid enough that he’d try and walk back to town from here just out of spite, instead of riding back in the truck.

“Are you actually taking me back to town?” Lex challenged.

“Sure,” Jonathan told him with a smile, as he clicked on his seatbelt. The boy was learning. “I’ll bring you right back to your house.”

Lex gave him a long look.

He put his hand on the open door.

Then he looked up at Jonathan, looked him straight in the eye, and asked, “Why don’t you let Clark hold his baby sister?”

Jonathan may have raised an eyebrow or two.

But he didn’t answer.

“You might be testing me,” Lex Luthor said after a while. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not testing you.”

...Huh.

Well. Jonathan could live with that.

“It’s not me who’s not letting him do that,” Jonathan answered honestly.

Lex frowned at him, then said. “Why doesn’t _Mrs. Kent_ let him do it?”

Jonathan sighed.

“Luthor,” he told him with more than a little exasperation, draping a hand over the steerinng wheel and sitting back in his seat, “You’re asking the wrong question.”

“Oh?” Luthor said. “Then what should I be asking?”

“You should be asking why _Clark_ doesn’t want to hold his baby sister,” Jonathan informed him tersely.

Luthor blinked, then stared at him.

Jonathan waited.

“...Why doesn’t Clark want to hold his baby sister?” Lex repeated back to him tonelessly, without the least bit of expression upon his face.

“Ask him sometime,” Jonathan said, knowing full well what kind of can of worms he might be opening, passing the buck back along to Clark like this.

And then he shoved the key into the ignition and turned it.

Lex got in.

~*~*~*~*~*~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: There will be a Part 3...


End file.
